| Thank you! And hope there was nothing in my comments that came off the wrong way. A few more comments, since you seem so receptive. :-) • I do understand why you wouldn't want to have bothered to write a tutorial (it's too much work, there are enough tutorials already, etc). But still, it may have helped to link to one or two, just to catch the curious crowd. • Specifically: Yesterday I later looked around, and I found this tutorial most inviting (big font, short pages, enough pictures and examples, and interactive querying right on the page): https://wdqs-tutorial.toolforge.org/ — but I couldn't find this tutorial linked from Wikidata or the Wikipedia page on Wikidata; I actually found it in the "See also" section of the Wikipedia page on SPARQL. (After reading this one, the tutorial at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_tutorial also looks ok to me, but that's the "curse of knowledge" already: I know I wasn't enthused the first time I saw it…) • In fact, after taking a few (tens of?) minutes to skim through these tutorials, the query here isn't a particularly tricky query, I thought! So it may not be that the query language is "hard" or "difficult"; the challenge is just to get people over that initial bump of unfamiliarity. • The Wikidata query page (e.g. https://w.wiki/3vrd) already has a prominent big blue button on the left edge, but somehow the first time I loaded the page it still wasn't prominent enough for me to realize to click it. It may be nice if the button were somehow even more prominent, or if loading the page (for shared links) would automatically display the query results (possibly cached). (Or, the big white area where the results appear could say "click to see results here" or something.) • It may be worth considering making labelled output the default and raw ids something to explicitly ask for, at least in the beginner's version of the query engine. • In your blog post, even if not writing a tutorial, IMO it would have helped to just explain the query in a line of two, i.e. translate each of the statements into English. (This is less work than teaching someone to arrive at the query themselves.) • Even if neither writing a tutorial nor explaining the query, IMO it would have helped to just mention something like "Yes, this query is in an unfamiliar language, but it takes only a few minutes to learn: see <here> and <here>" — basically, just acknowledge that there may be some barrier here (however small) for people who don't already know. • Such things are exactly our blind spots when writing, so it's not easy. The only way I know is to show the writing to some people in the target audience and get feedback. Fortunately, you don't have to ask too many people: these researchers in usability testing say "You Only Need to Test with 5 Users": https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-w... Thanks for your post, ultimately as a result of reading it, and commenting about it and being shown a solution to my problem, in the end now I'm more likely, and better equipped, to try Wikidata in future. |
I agree with some of your suggestions on making the system easier to use. It's open source, and I hope someone will be motivated enough to give it a try - the development team can only do so many things, unfortunately.
Thanks again for the constructive comments!