Research:User preferences

Contact

Dario Taraborelli

Wikimedia Foundation

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Research:Projects

This page documents a planned research project.
Information may be incomplete and change before the project starts.

Key Personnel

• Dario Taraborelli
• Jared Zimmerman
• Benny Situ
• Matt Flaschen

Project Summary

This project aims to improve the usability of the MediaWiki user preference pane, by identifying:

• what prefs users never touch
• the prefs that they all change to the same new value
• what prefs different segments of users change to define new defaults.

The data collected will allow us to clean up and remove prefs, and make sure that frequently changed prefs are easy to access.

Methods

We will collect data on preference changes by instrumenting MediaWiki via the UserSaveOptions hook. The data collected is specified by Schema:PrefUpdate.

External links

• UX: Clean up preferences
• Wikipedia user preferences: A snapshot of user preferences set by active Wikipedia editors. Active editors are defined as registered users with at least 5 edits per month in a given project. The dumps were generated on 2012-10-10 and include data for the top 10 Wikipedias (de, en, es, fr, it, ja, nl, pl, pt, ru).

See also

Evergoing projects:

• Gadgets
• Review of existing preferences (2012–): mw:Requests for comment/Core user preferences
• Graph of MediaWiki work

Docs:

• Help:Preferences
• mw:Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions