[Mediawiki-i18n] Length of messages in BetaFeatures

[Siebrand Mazeland (WMF)]

On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 8:34 PM, Mark Holmquist <mtraceur at member.fsf.org>wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 07:59:53PM +0200, Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) wrote:
> > This is for the daring, intrepid early adopters who want to see every
> > single experimental feature as it rolls out. Your account will
> > automatically get the latest features when they come out. You can always
> > come back to this page to disable the ones you decide not to use, but
> this
> > will give you the most bleeding-edge experience on the site.
> >
> >  ... consider thinking some more. Does this say about the same, and
> conveys
> > the same concept requiring less time of the user?
> >
> > [checkbox] Automatically use all experimental features.
>
> This was your suggestion on the patchset, when it first surfaced, IIRC.
>

At least I'm consistent :).


> But I'm not sure that the explanations are both the same - your suggestion
> gives the impression that the user would have every feature enabled by
> this one, which isn't the case. *Future* features will all be enabled
> by default, but existing ones will stay disabled if they were before.
>
> In any case, I feel I may not have been terribly clear - I *want* there
> to be long-form descriptions of these features. People are working on
> them and want to "sell" them to users, and this is their chance. We have,
> comparatively to old preference fields, a much larger amount of space to
> use for descriptions of features, which (I believe) is part of what the
> design team intended - see this screenshot[0] of the extension's tab, for
> example.
>
> I'll get in touch with them to see if I can push back on that part of it,
> but if we end up with longer descriptions, what would your suggestion be?
>

International English, well thought out, as brief as possible. People don't
read. Really, they don't[1].

The screenshot is very useful. The 4-6 word heading will probably do the
trick. Make that suck less, and the fine print will be ir^H^Hless relevant.


> [0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BetaFeatures_2013-09-04.png
>
[1] http://uxmyths.com/post/647473628/myth-people-read-on-the-web

>
> --
> Mark Holmquist
>


Siebrand
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-i18n/attachments/20130904/0444238e/attachment.html>