Wikipedia talk:Wikistress Reduction Initiative

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[edit] Explanations for observation

[edit] Skimming vs. reading

I believe one factor that might produce the effect Robchurch and NicholasTurnbull observed is that when laid out in a graphical browser, text (and talk-page text especially--always known for popping the stress meters) you see a lot of text laid out together, and in a threaded format that is structured like, oh, a slashdot forum. Whereas you might get 40 or so lines of text at a time in a terminal window. The structure of the text, the "popout" of the signatures and other visual cues encourage one to "skim" the text rather than read it all, while you really have to read every word when using lynx.

Skimming this way might increase wikistress because you might skip verbal cues that soften a person's message or position (on the other hand, I might be mistaken... ...I understand your point of view and am not calling into question your competence), and because you mentally "fill in" the gaps you haven't read literally with your expectation of what someone is saying, rather than reading what they actually say.

I have no idea if this is a factor or not, it just occurred to me. Demi ^T/_C 00:06, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Hmm... a very interesting hypothesis indeed, and may well be correct; the same effect can occasionally be noticed with newspapers, periodicals, books, and other printed matter. Some material has a subconsciously stressful appearance, possibly because of its layout - the psychological effect of a run of text that can easily be skipped is most noticeable, and may be a loss of cues as you mentioned. I wonder if perhaps, in addition to the cues issue, there is an added matter of comprehension, because if you skip whole chunks of text there is a tendency to not understand the rest of what transpired (this can be quite easily observed trying to follow conversation threads on IRC). I know that I personally "panic" to a lesser degree when I read text that I can't logically dissassemble mentally, and perhaps this is the effect at work with talk pages. I also think that linespacing, character width and font face probably play an important part - since lynx runs in terminal mode, it uses a fixed-pitch monospaced font with clear serifs, usually in inverse colour to in a graphical web browser. I recall a psychological study found that sans-serif fonts had a slightly different effect on the brain to serif fonts, and the "chunking" mechanisms of the brain behaved differently when dealing with sans-serif text. --NicholasTurnbull | (talk) 15:19, 16 January 2006 (UTC)