Wikidata talk:Usability and usefulness/Feedback round 17-12 Term box Behavior

While trying the prototype feel free to answer these questions:

• How do you expect it to work?
• How did you end up doing it?
• Did anything good or bad happen?

Thoughts from Mbch331

I tried the other languages box. Clicking "Show all entered languages" worked like expected. It showed all languages with a label. Then I tried British English (after clicking show fewer languages) and nothing happened. On the one hand this is as expected, since English is already shown, on the other hand, if it doesn't do anything, why is it in the list? Next I tried Canadian English and nothing happened. This is not expected behaviour. If you mention British English and Canadian English in the list I expect something to happen when I click Canadian English. Swiss German doesn't do anything either, Spanish does add a line showing the Spanish label etc. I clicked in the drop down, the text disappears and I can enter text. I typed one of the languages that was shown in the dropdown and nothing happens. I expect to see that the Danish language label is shown. Mbch331 (talk) 15:49, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Hello Mbch331 Thank you for your feedback. It seems, my introduction to the prototype lacks valuable information. This kind of prototype is not a real website in terms of its functionality. It only allows very limited interaction. In this case you are just able to click things related to "Spanish", "Russian", the "edit", "save" and "cancel" buttons as well as the drop down "Other Languages". So you already figured, that only "Spanish" does the trick but nothing else. Did you actually see green borders around some of the elements on the page? Sorry, that the functionality was not clear from the beginning and again thank you for your feedback. --Hanna Petruschat (WMDE) (talk) 18:08, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

I did see the green borders, but didn't know what they meant. Thanks for explaining. Mbch331 (talk) 18:13, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Thoughts from ArthurPSmith (talk) 16:05, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

I expected the "Pin" checkboxes to have an immediate effect. I unchecked "German", but German was still there. I then clicked "Show all entered languages" and all languages were shown, but the checkbox on the German line was now checked. I unchecked "German" again, and checked the checkboxes for "Russian" and "Arabic". Then I hit "Show Fewer Languages", and I now saw 3 languages: English, German, and Russian (checkboxes all checked). I was expecting English, Russian, and Arabic.

I expected "edit" mode to allow adding a language; when I clicked "Edit" it opened up a new line for another language, so that's nice. I expected the language selection to be either a dropdown or autocomplete, and to forbid using an already entered language - none of that happened. I typed "Arabic", and there didn't seem to be any selection process involved. I clicked on the language box and "Arabic" vanished - I was expecting the text in that box to stick around so I would have to delete it or amend it. I then entered "English" and there was no indication this was a duplicate language; I entered "Portuguese" (not on the "other languages" list) and still no reaction, it seemed the same either way. I entered "Portugues" (not a valid language name I assume) and still no reaction. I assume language selection here has to be fixed somehow... Text in the Label, Description and Aliases boxes also vanished when I clicked, so there was no way to go back and edit existing entries, the UI is expecting them to be entered all at once and then not changed I guess.

I was expecting selecting a language from the "Other Languages" dropdown would add it to the languages shown in the box, but this did not happen - I selected "Czech" and several others, and there was no change to the displayed languages.

ArthurPSmith (talk) 16:05, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Thoughts from ArthurPSmith (talk) 16:05, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Additional note - I was expecting "edit" mode to allow editing the existing entries, but it did not - when I clicked in the areas for the label in English, for example, there was no UI reaction and there didn't appear to be any way to change the label. Note all the above comments are based on using Safari on Mac OS X 10.13.2 ArthurPSmith (talk) 16:07, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Hello ArthurPSmith Thank you very much for your detailed description. This helped me recognizing that my introduction to the prototype lacks relevant information. To make up for this now: This is just a really low level prototype no actually developed website. This means, that there are just very few elements which are really interactive, in this case it's: "Spanish", "Russian", the "edit", "save" and "cancel" buttons as well as the drop down "Other Languages". I was hoping the green highlight around these elements would help guiding the user. Did that appear in your case? Thank you again for your feedback. I hope the above explanation answers some of your questions and clarifies misunderstandings. --Hanna Petruschat (WMDE) (talk) 18:08, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Ah, yes, I see the green highlights. They don't show up in the drop-down list where some of the working functionality is though (clicking Spanish and Russian there did do what I expected). ArthurPSmith (talk) 19:23, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Thoughts from ChristianKl (✉) 17:04, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

I generally like the ability to add a new language to an item.

For me not immedtiately intuitive what the pining is supposed to be about, it took me some time to understand that it's supposed to be a way about changing the languages that are listed. My first idea was that it was supposed to be a way to batch edit labels of the item.

For my usage the mode of either showing my default languages or showing all languages with one click is good enough. When I want to look at languages that are not in my default languages I usually want to see all languages and this will take an additional click (and significant mouse travel) with your proposed prototype.

There seems to be another change in the term behavior that already made it to production. The language box shows no information about the language code anymore. Given the status quo of how languages are used in Wikidata I think that's a bad change. A user is going to find entries like "Added [es] description" on his watchlist and that means it's important for a user to know language codes. Not having the information about them in the term box makes that harder. Language codes are also necessary to enter interwiki links and entering interwiki links is a task that's often done by users who are not experienced Wikidata users.

The way the prototype works at the moment suggests I could add "Swe" as an additional language. Treating languages as simple string seems to be obviously wrong. ChristianKl (✉) 17:04, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Hello ChristianKl Thank you for your feedback. We will work on handling language codes in the next steps and your insights help us get a better understanding of the different use cases we are dealing with. --Hanna Petruschat (WMDE) (talk) 18:08, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

As far as language entry there are currenlty multiple separate systems:

1. New item/property creation
2. Language setting for monolingual strings in statements
3. Interwiki links
4. Entering language codes manually for babel
5. Switching the default language

From among them like that monolingual strings allows both typing the language name and also typing the language name. It might be worthwhile to not go to six ways but cut down on the number of different systems. ChristianKl (✉) 23:13, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks ChristianKl for your detailed feedback. As stated earlier: the prototype has a very little complexity which didn’t allow auto suggestions for example. Still you definitely have a point about the language entry methods. This is something we have in our minds and are working on constantly to streamline and unify language inputs more. I would like to point out though that for example wiki links are not real language codes which therefore might not be unified. --Hanna Petruschat (WMDE) (talk) 18:13, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Usability for GerardM

Hoi, the approach is one where the only languages selected are the full languages. There are quite a few languages like Ottoman Turkish (ota) that do not have a Wikimedia project or are on the Incubator. It would be good when they are included in this list. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 09:23, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback GerardM, I would like to point out though, that decisions on which languages show up are in the hands of the community. --Hanna Petruschat (WMDE) (talk) 18:15, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Really? what is the process for that? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 06:01, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

It works via adding a new interface language. https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translatewiki.net_languages#Policy_on_enabling_translation_into_a_language is linked to for that from mediawiki:Manual:Language. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 16:22, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Thoughts from MichaelSchoenitzer (talk)

Seems a nice solution! I only wonder: do the pin-checkboxes have to stay there always? The wikidata-interface is already quite full and cluttered. -- MichaelSchoenitzer (talk) 14:02, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback, MichaelSchoenitzer. It’s good you pointed this out. We figured through the feedback loop that this element is rather questionable and will put more thoughts in another solution. --Hanna Petruschat (WMDE) (talk) 18:16, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Perhaps a bit offtopic: Reference URL for aliases

I was wondering, why don't we have references for aliases? For instance, according to this source, General Sudirman (an Indonesian national hero) has Si Kaji as his childhood nickname/alias.

Fadirra (talk) 17:31, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

This is indeed offtopic in this discussion and such topics are better raised on the project chat. If you want to store a childhood name with references you can use name (P2561) with the qualifier object has role (P3831) childhood nickname (Q742466). This is a way to store the information precisely. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 16:27, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the input, already added the data as suggested! -Fadirra (talk) 05:16, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

Additional feedback for the term box

Currently, the term box lists in the default view all aliases of an item. In a case like Karl Bryullov (Q4768) that means 28 English aliases. It might be worthwhile to think about displaying 5 aliases and if there are more provide a button to expand the view and show all aliases. In any case, it's useful to look in the UI design how cases with a lot of aliases are handeled. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 14:52, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

Hi again, ChristianKl, I absolutely agree on this. There is a task for that on phabricator. Thanks for pointing it out again. This might be the chance to implement changes for aliases as well. --Hanna Petruschat (WMDE) (talk) 18:18, 10 January 2018 (UTC)