technique - How credible is wikipedia?

I understand that this question relates more to wikipedia than it does writing but...

If I was going to use wikipedia for a source for a research project (for example) would the information be correct? I know that anyone can go on there and edit it, but the Internet has other invalid information that isn't on wikipedia. I'm thinking that over time as an article matures on wikipedia, it would have gone through a large amount of edits and be correct, but I could be wrong. The reason I want to use wikipedia is because all of the information is consolidated in one place with references.

I do believe that I should use google to search my information (which I do) and might come off as "lazy". This question may be closed because it is off-topic as well.

Answer

Do /not/ ever, under any circumstances use Wikipedia as a source for an academic paper. Because it can be edited by anyone and there is nothing validating Wikipedia's articles, they're highly unreliable and not acceptable in any professional or academic circles. Internet sources in general are frowned upon unless they come from professional or academic sources - colleges, academic journals, government studies, etc.

That's not to say Wikipedia is entirely useless. It's a great starting point. It can give you a great overview of a topic and help you get a basis for your paper/project/whatever. And the best part? Lots of it is sourced, so you don't have to go find information for yourself. If you want to say That George Washington did not return to military life until the outbreak of the revolution in 1775, that's fine. But instead of citing Wikipedia, click on the source and cite the source that Wikipedia uses.

career development - What can I do now without schooling to get me experienced in UX?

I'm out of school for the summer then I start community college, I do not want to waste time. Is there anything I can do to gain knowledge and experience? I doubt I can score an internship without any knowledge or experience so..

copywriting - Relative dates/times- Rounding and how accurate?

I was reading this question about formatting relative dates and times, but there are still some issue that I felt have not been addressed yet.

I would like to:

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  Keep relative times to just 1 unit, for example 1 hour ago as opposed to 1 hour and 24 minutes ago.

  
  


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  When the time/date is hovered, we display the localized date, for example, Tuesday, 24 July 2012 at 10:00 PM.

  
  

Given the above:

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  Should I round up or round down times? For example how should I turn 1 hour and 24 minutes ago into just hours?

  
  


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  Should I display relative days as Yesterday, 2 Days ago, 3 Days ago, or Yesterday, Tuesday, Monday?

  
  
  


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  At what point should I stop with the 2 Days ago, Tuesday, Monday and revert to displaying localized dates?

  
  


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  Should I bother having relative time/dates for weeks and months?

  
  


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  When should I drop the time component and just display the date/day?

  
  

Answer

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  Rounding - you should apply the same rules you would to a floating point number so "1 hour 24 minutes" is less than 1.5 hours so it should be rounded down to "1 hour". When you pass 30 minutes then round up.

  
  


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  I'd go with "Yesterday", "2 days ago" etc.

  
  


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  A quick check on Stack Exchange shows that they use "Yesterday", "2 days ago", localised date, while (as you point out) Facebook goes for the days of the week. I think that the answer depends on how accurate you need the date to be. Do your users need to know the exact date (easily worked out from "today" and "yesterday", but slightly harder to work out from "Monday" or "Friday") or is "some time this week" or "recently" good enough?

  
  


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  If you're already displaying older dates as the actual date rather than "some time ago" when the date is a 2 or 3 days old, then having relative dates for weeks and months seems to be irrelevant.

  
  


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  While the time component for a date that's a year old appears to be irrelevant, it's probably not worth the extra coding effort to hide it for older dates. The benefit (if any) of hiding the time probably isn't worth the cost of writing and maintaining the necessary code.

  
  

However, with all of these it depends on how accurate you need your dates and times to be. Is it important that the displayed value is as accurate as possible or is the exact date/time on a tooltip OK?

input fields - How should I implement Language selection in a CMS?

One of my client must be able to post News to both french and english language on his website. I would like to know how I should design the CMS to be the most convenient for the admin as possible.

Below is captures of what I thought would solve the problem but I doubt it's the best way to do it as I am no UX expert.

I would like your advices on that if possible.

Answer

Vertical workflow is more natural than horizontal unless the user is comparing content side-by-side. Moreover, horizontal arrangement requires users to have very wide monitors to work comfortably. Finally, there's no need to force users into a particular sequence of languages - let them decide what version is going to be posted first.

Thus, the mock-up will look like this:

Note that the radio buttons should be listed vertically despite the available space in the line (unless you have multiple columns of languages) and that the "Add translation" button should be placed closer to the editor than to the publishing controls.

Clicking "Add translation" (or whatever you want to call it) should duplicate the language selector and the editor controls right above the button so that the publishing controls stay separate from the editor.

resize - Gimp : difference between crop and canvas size

I would like to know the difference between the crop tool and changing canvas size.

If I reduce the size of the canvas, a yellow dashed line stays around the previous size. On the other hand, when I crop an image, the yellow dashed line follows.

What is the difference between resizing the canvas and cropping an image?

Answer

When you make your Canvas smaller you are allowing for larger layers around the Canvas, you are just saying: "this is the area of my image that I want to show". When you crop, you crop all the layers, ie: you delete everything outsize the cropping area.

forms - Is a confirm email address field still considered a best practice?

Having an input field to confirm an email address is pretty standard. However, I would like to know if using a confirm email address field still considered a best practice.

The Email and Confirm email input controls account for a majority of the form abandonment for a client of mine. There are a variety of different reasons for it but i'm offering the following suggestions.

• Remove the confirm email address. My rationale is that no one actually double types so if they've copied an pasted from the email input control they'll both match but you can't guarantee either is right.


• Keep both boxes but provide immediate feedback to users with a javascript enabled browsers (ARIA - will be introduce in the next phase, so accessibility will fall back to server side validation) if the email addresses match/don't match.

Personally i'd like them to remove it. I think they are pointless and the form is very long as it is but i need evidence not just my opinion.

adobe photoshop - Transparency is lost in illustrator CS6 when I use image trace. Help!

so I'm pretty new to illustrator so sorry if this is obvious - but, I'm having troubles with the transparency of a flower image.

I placed the image of the flower which has no background from a saved photoshop file (psd) and then image traced in illustrator. But I can't now seem to overlay it on itself without the back ground, and also every time I transform, it re-renders the image.