Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-3417079-20150626034226/@comment-3417079-20150714080938

452 wrote: That's the second time you've mentioned Wordpress.

Mediawiki != Wordpress, nor is it intended to be. There's a reason I choose to use Mediawiki instead of Wordpress, and if Mediawiki was more like Wordpress, I wouldn't want to use it either.
 * If you like Wordpress better than Mediawiki, you're free to use a Wordpress site instead.
 * If you think Mediawiki should be more like Wordpress, you're free to suggest it to the Mediawiki devs.
 * If you think Wikia should ditch Mediawiki and use Wordpress, you're free to suggest it to Wikia.

Bruce A wrote:

showing it as an example so people can grok in their mind what it would look like when someone edits a page and gets that message. Anyone would cannot comprehend the basic concept that $1 will be replaced by the person's username should not be editing the welcome message in the first place.

I would have also added "If they can't handle the concept of $1, how are they ever going to handle anything more advanced in templates?", but you've already covered that in your final paragraph.

Bruce A wrote:

Manuals and explanations are, for the most part, a sign that things weren't designed as well as they could have been. That's an interesting opinion which tells us a lot about you, thanks for sharing it, but I'm not sure I want to live in a world where everything is dumbed down to that point. Using WordPress and it's features as an analogy and example =/= wanting to use WordPress.

Good usability and accessibility =/= "dumbing things down."

Good usability is really about making systems that cater to humans, rather than expecting humans to cater to us. Great example: natural language processing--something that is hugely compelling and will eventually result in us being able to ask a smartphone or computer a question in our normal, everyday language and have it give meaningful answers.

The very best example I can give of why things should generally be as simple and easy as possible is this quote from Steve Job's biography :

One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, an engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up.

Kenyon started to explain, but Jobs cut him off. “If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could.

Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. “Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster” Atkinson recalled.​

452 wrote: Anyone would cannot comprehend the basic concept that $1 will be replaced by the person's username should not be editing the welcome message in the first place.

Using that logic, you could also make a case for saying word processors should not have visual editors and that visual editors are somewhat unneccessary. You can just apply bold using things like *bold* and [b]bold[/b]. Most people can comprehend that; no need to make all these elaborate visual interfaces.

But they do have visual editors and nice interfaces for very good reasons: it greatly improves usability and accessibility.

The idea that "if user X cannot do Y" is one that has unfortunate consequences. We should be making and encouraging systems that are accessible to more people, not less.

Young people, non-tech-savvy people, or people with little education or intellectual or learning disabilities should have an opportunity to use systems, too.

And designers have an opportunity--really, a responsbility--to design systems that fascilitate that.

Anyway, let's get back to the actual thread topic: welcome messages (rather than all this design stuff).