UCD and UX

This UX/UCD assignment immediately brings to mind my experience working with Wikipedia in my Composition II classes. In those classes, my students are responsible for contributing to a Wikipedia article instead of writing an academic research paper.

In 2014, when I first started doing this assignment, editing a Wikipedia article was done via the old-fashioned way: via wikitext language, or wiki markup. As one can see below, learning how to compose in wikitext felt almost like learning a whole new language. It was a beast; the antithesis of user-friendly.

Starting in 2015, however, Wikipedia unveiled the Visual Editor, which allowed contributors to edits articles almost as easily they would a Google or Word doc, with formatting buttons, paragraphing options, auto-generated citations, etc.

This innovation was obviously so much more inclusive, and encouraged the whole Wikipedia community to contribute to the site (whereas previously, with wikitext, this was limited to those who had the technical know-how or the time to learn it). It essentially flat-lined the expertise needed in order to contribute to Wikipedia, obviously resulting in a much more holistic and inclusive contributor base.