The King of Pointland

Wikipedia

I am a big fan of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia created by the people, for the people. Anybody can edit it, even you. You'd think it would result in chaos, but it doesn't.

I like Wikipedia's snazzy new look, too, but I have a complaint: they are abusing the Tab Metaphor. Yep, that's right, I said it. Allow me to explain.

Here are the tabs at the top of a typical article in Wikipedia:

As you can see, there are tabs for the actual article, discussion (of the article), editing, and history. It's the last two tabs with which I have a beef. Take the history tab for example. If you're looking at the article, and click the history tab, you get a history of changes made to the article page. But if you're looking at the discussion and click the history tab, you get a history of changed made to the discussion page.

I find this confusing. My expectation is that by clicking any of the four tabs I can see four specific pages (for a given article). Instead, the pages referred to change depending on my "use-hysteresis". Imagine if you were looking through your filing cabinet, and the contents of the folders changed depending on the order in which you looked at them!

You can see they were at least aware of this issue, because the edit and history tabs are separated with a little extra space, but that's just a band-aid. The real problem is that they're using the wrong UI metaphor.

History and Edit should probably be buttons, or even unobtrusive links in the upper right of the article box.

To my way of thinking, anyway.