User:El Sandifer/Susan

Susan is a hypothetical Wikipedian, selected because she behaves in a manner basically consistent with most of our editors.

Susan is a 40-year-old stay-at-home mother. She majored in English many years ago, and still has a fondness for Jane Austen. She is idly browsing the Internet, and happens by Pride and Prejudice. In five minutes, her son gets off the school bus. She finds an error on the page.

Wikipedia policy and process should be designed so that Susan can make this change and have it not get reverted.

In fact, there ought not be any small task on Wikipedia that cannot be completed by Susan.

This requires some things.

There must not be any policies or processes that are sufficiently complex that Susan would have to look them up before doing anything. Everything should be both memorizable and of sufficient simplicity that the remembered version will be trustworthy. That is to say that Susan should be able to get by with the nutshell versions of our policies. And, more to the point, there should be no surprise policies. There should be no policies that Susan doesn't read and go "Yes, I'd expect that to be a policy."
There must not be a bunch of code or formatting for what she wants to do. If Susan has to go "Wait, what's the template for this?" then she will have to get up and go meet her son instead of fixing the problem.
We must not require anything that Susan does not have fast access to. No research projects, no scavenger hunts. Not even a Google search or pulling a book off of a shelf. Susan should be able to improve Wikipedia on her own.
There must be a culture of good faith so that Susan's contribution (which will probably come in as an IP contribution) will not instantly be met with suspicion. Remember - if Susan goes back the next day and her change has been reverted without explanation, she is unlikely to edit again.

Think carefully about these issues when designing something for Wikipedia. Susan is intelligent, well-meaning, and a valuable resource. She will improve Wikipedia if we let her. And there are thousands of Susans out there. Susan, or someone with Susan's circumstances, is our average and most common editor.

Design for Susan.