The page history under the "Info" action is undiscoverable

Observation

Looking for the history of changes for the page currently viewed the user will search for something similar to "Changes" or "History", ignoring "Info" because is too generic.

Task

Trying to find the history of changes of the page currently viewed.

Users

Myself and others that tried to use moinmoin.

Context

This often happens when checking the freshness of a page by looking in the history how often has been updated and mantained, but it happens every time one has to find where is the history.

MoinMoin version: 1.5

Discussion

Putting the page history under "Info" makes it undiscoverable.

Currently the only information available by clicking on the "Info" is the page revision history, so it may be pratical to just rename this action to "Changes", "Show Changes" or "History" (Mediawiki uses the latter).

• There is more under "info" than history as you can find out yourself. That's why it is not called "history".

  • Yup! But I still think that the history is important enough to deserve a clear link in the link bar, while the other informations contained in the "Info" page are of infrequent interest, so can be put in the "More actions" list.

  • But the fact that there is more doesn't make this problem invalid: users coming from other wikis will not find the history without searching. That's it. It doesn't matter in that case how much more or less is behind "info".
• I agree that "info" is a really poor label. But that's the normal way discussions go in Moin: the main programmers, which are experts in Moin, always have arguments, why this is so and so and so and so. That's why Moin is - concerning usability sakes - a really poor engine and I don't see, that this will change in future. The main developpers are simply not willing/not capable to see the problems of everyday users. And I can tell you, I know a lot of user complaing about Moin usability. But not to misunderstand me: saftey and other things are really great in Moin, but usability certainly not.

• Is this so? Are ThomasWaldmann and AlexanderSchremmer so negative about changing info / splitting it so that it can have a name that actually means something?

  • is this now a feature request, so it's the wrong place And if so please describe it for me more clearer so if I do decide to spent some time on patching the theme I did it at first term right. Show an image or make a list what describes what do you want. -- ReimarBauer 2006-10-10 12:19:20

    No, I dislike info as well. -- AlexanderSchremmer 2006-10-15 12:00:40

• Some suggestions:

  • I would use the following menu-items (when I look at moderne theme): Edit (Text) Edit(GUI) ShowLastChanges(Diff) Versions(or History) FileAttachments Printview. I would move the rest to the drop-down menu and give the drop down menu some order that makes sense and lists these actions above, which normal users would mostly use: "Subscribe/Unsubscribe", "Add/Remove Quicklink", "Check Spelling", "Despam", "Rename Page", "Delete Page", "--", "Render as Raw", Render as PDF", "Render as Docbook", "Render as Slideshow","Make zip-File", "--", ("General Page Info", "Page Statitics", "--"), "Find similar pages", "Show local site map", "My Pages"

  • I have never understood the action "clear cache". I have also never seen some serious office programm, which has a menu-item like "reset pointer i to zero". For me, it sounds like that. Sure, you can give some explantion to me, why you have this menu item. And I will understand it then. But normal users don't have this explanation, they are simply confused by this. "Why clear chache?" "Opps, what's a chache anyhow? And god, what is a docbook and raw text? Like pages? Uff, is this all Chinese". (I'm not a computer scientist. But once I asked one what a docbook is, he didn't know. How should any normal user know that?)
  • "Subscribe User". I hate it being subscribed for a page by other users. That's just like spam! Normal users therefore shouldn't be able to do that. Admins are only few persons normally (less than 1% of users, I guess). We don't need to add a menu item, that only a small percentage could/should use.
  • Remark to moderne theme: by the way, why is, when clicking e.g. on info, the menubar changed? Before it started like "Edit (text) Edit (GUI)" now it's only "Edit". This adds even more confusion to the user. I would leave it the same. I would also not write "immutable page" instead of "edit". Rather put it in gray text, so that it is not clickable. Or leave it clickable, the user will get an error message anyway. I would write immutable page in small letters behind the page titel or in red letter in the moderne theme menue bar on the right side or at the end of the page, where the last edit remarks and so on.. are shown.

  • Maybe it is worth a thought, whether to add some new feature. See UsabilityObservation/UserCannotReturnToWikiPageAfterPerformedAction. I would'nt, like stated there, integrate that in the menu. One should avoid changing menues dynamically. That confuses the users. I would integrate a link in the action pages itself. You cannot expect that a user gets on the idea that by clicking on "Clear message" after successful file upload that he could get back to the underlying wikipage by that. Rather place some link "Return to underlying wikipage" on top of the action page. Or we add behind the "more actions menu" two grayed items, which are only activated, when needed "Show Wikipage" "Show Parent Page"?

  • For the printview menu item, which is now placed outside the drop-down box in the menu line and thus might be more heavily used: I would appreciate it, when the page, showing the wiki page in printview (with print.css) to have a link on top of the page "Return to Screenview" - of course, this link is not printed out itself but it is rather for a better navigation and more comfort. This could be achieved by placing in the wikipage  <div id="navigation"> <a href=".."> Click here to return to screenview </a> </div> and in the print.css stylesheet  #navigation {display: none;} . See for that also http://www.einfach-fuer-alle.de/artikel/druck/ (German only)

Dirty Fix

In MoinMoin/i18n/en.MoinMoin.po change

msgid "Info"
msgstr ""

to

msgid "Info"
msgstr "History"

The downside - this makes the "General Info" page undiscoverable. -- Ro 2009-02-02 23:31:46

You suggest adding a wrong translation to all languages to "fix" something that isn't broken (see discussion above)?

You know that this might affect any code that calls_('Info'), not necessarily only the place where it is used for the navibar?

CategoryUsabilityObservation