New users failing to create new page, choosing one of the templates instead of the "Create New Empty Page" link
Observation
The page for creating a new page (when you visit a non existing page) has caused confusion with new users.
- Most users skip the "Create new empty page" link which is probably what they want, and use one of the templates.
- Most choose the first choice, because they don't know what to choose
many have picked CategoryTemplate, which confuses them more
- The two users who had this problem have technical backgrounds (engineering), but aren't programmers and didn't grow up with computers.
- Two observations were made by noticing users had created a page using the category template. The other was made over-the-shoulder when talking a user through creating a new page. He held the cursor over the category template at the top of the template list and asked if that is what he wanted. He didn't notice "Create new empty page."
Discussion
Why the users failed in the task?
I think the "Create new empty page" is buried between the bold text and the templates.
Maybe the "Create new empty page" is confusing, they do not want to create an empty page 
How to prevent this failure?
In Microsoft Word (I know, I know), if you select File->New, you get a tabbed dialog with the templates. The first template in the first tab ("general") is "blank document" and is selected by default. Perhaps something similar could be done where "blank page" is the obvious choice? Templates would be a nice way to introduce people to wiki (select template and modify), but having lots of them in alphabetical order would be hard to sort out.
it is more confusing when you have 3 choices, create new empty page, select from a list of templates and try similar pages. The best solution would be change the create new empty page into a template: BlankPageTemplate, or EmptyPageTemplate which create empty page.
Also, the order of the templates is important, the default should be first, and we may have groups if we have many options.
-- NirSoffer 2005-05-11 18:46:29
Current workaround for admins
Edit MissingPage:
- Remove the "create new empty page" Action macro
Create an empty template called "EmptyPageTemplate" or "BlankPageTemplate"
Currently there is no way to replace the list of templates with a real list sorted by type of template. To do this, we need to add a macro that lets you edit the current page using a template. This macro is very simple, it should create links in this format:
http://site/path/to/page?action=edit&template=SomeTemplate
Planning
Maybe we can do this by extending the Action macro, or by having Edit macro. Since editing is so important in a wiki, I think it is the best way. Can work like this:
[[Edit(template[, backto])]] template - page to use as template backto - go back to this page after you edit - do we need this?
Problem: its hard work to find and add manually all templates, and maybe for most of them the alphabetical order is just right.
Another option, having a special page, like EditTemplates, which the wiki admin can add the templates he wants in the correct order. EditTemplates macro can use the pages listed there to create a menu or a list.
It can work like this:
If there is no EditingTemplates page, you get the default order (blank page, space, then all other sorted from a to z?)
- If the page exists, you get the page content
- If there are templates not on that page, they are added automatically to the end of the list.
- The page can be part of underlay, the admin can change it if he want to add templates or change order.
The problem with both solutions, someone has to add new templates manually, but there is no other way to have both a specific template order and different templates on each wiki.