User blog comment:Susanolivia/Fixed Width, Sidebar, and the Removal of Monaco/@comment-167456-20101003181323/@comment-4713673-20101004203255

We've responded about the reasoning in several blog comments, but you're right, this isn't currently in the FAQ. I've just made a note to add it there as well so it's easily accessible to everyone.

In the meantime here's an extended version of they "why" behind attribution from our beta forum:

Universally, the feedback that we got from user testing on Monaco is that people didn't understand who created the pages. The MediaWiki Foundation saw exactly the same thing when they did user testing on Wikipedia -- the vast majority of people on the internet think that Wikipedia is written by a small group of people, and they can't or shouldn't participate.

When you walk through a parking lot, every car has a door handle and an ignition -- but you don't walk by a strange car and think that you're meant to open the door and put in your own key. In the same way, people have a blind spot about the edit button -- they see it, but they assume that it's meant for somebody else to use.

We asked people to look at a Monaco page and tell us who wrote the text. People just looked at it and said they didn't know. As far as they were concerned, a wiki was just another word for a content site with lots of information.

One of the top priorities for the new look is to have people understand immediately that a wiki is made by people -- and that they can be one of those people.

When we showed people the new design and asked who wrote the text, they pointed to the name listed on the history dropdown, and then to the names of the people under the photos -- and as they scrolled down a long page, they could see lots of different names scrolling by. The most common response was: "Wow, there are a lot of people working on this site! Who are these guys?" Then they would click on one of the user names under the photos, and go look at a user page. They saw real people -- those people's profiles and contributions and talk pages -- and they understood that a wiki was made by a community of people who all love the topic.

By giving people an understanding that a wiki is made by a community we give them the permission they're looking for to click the edit link and become a contributor.