Hi Members,
I found Derek Moore's attitude toward his problem seeing our many
multicolor links in Wikipedia, due to color blindness, a bit startling. He
said, today:
<snip> I suppose I'm the color blind minority, so I can just put up with
full underlines.
I have been hoping that someone else would bring up the issue of
accessibility in Wikipedia. Yet, having read over 20 e-mails on the problem of
our many and multi-colored links, I saw no mention of this issue. If Derek
Moore is having trouble with these links, try to imagine how useless these
color schemes are to a blind user. Do all members agree with him, that since he
is in a color blind minority, no attempt should be made to remedy the situation?
I think at this stage in Wikipedia's development, some of the basic
accessibility features might be incorporated in our software - like not
depending on color coding to convey information, and adding descriptions to all
images. I am strongly in favor of such features. Unfortunately, my programming
skills are not nearly strong enough to try to add any. Hopefully, some of the
developers will agree that accessibility is important and will be willing to
work on adding some of these features.
Opinion, please.???
For those members unfamiliar with what kind of features I am talking
about, please see the W3 Consortium's Web Content Guidelines for Accessibility
at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/
As Ever,
Ruth Ifcher
--
rclimit changed its meaning from "number of modified articles"
to "number of modifications", and that means that less changes
are displayed that it used to be the case.
Could it be changed to higher default on all Wikipedias ?
Oh, and could some higher option be added like 1000 (which would
display more or less as many as old 500) ?
On test.wikipedia.org, I added my proposed"alt" attribute for images if
no explicit description is given in the link.
[[image:foobar.jpg]] will have the description of [[image:foobar.jpg]]
as alt attribute, while
[[image:foobar.jpg|Testing]] will have "Testing" as alt attribute.
Magnus
>It worked like what I'm saying in UseMod (and phase 2), then upgrade
>broke it, and restoring old behaviour was requested to make Polish
>Wikipedia work correctly again.
Ah. Annoying inherited traditions.
>You use spaces in first column if you want to have Wiki markup with
>preformated text.
Oh, yeah. I keep forgettin' about that. *grin*
Well, while I was figurin' all this out, I found a bug. Check out
<http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox>. Edit the page, and insert a space
at the beginning of the first line, then save. Now edit the page again, and
put the disappearing space back and try to pad the top of the page with a
bunch o' blank lines, then save again. Go back into edit, and the blank
lines and space have disappeared. It appears Wikipedia doesn't like
preformatted text so long as it's at the top of a page or with no text above
it.
Derek
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As I've been working on my Disinfopedia, a couple of things have come
up that I thought I'd share:
(1) I've decided to use the Wikipedia interface as-is, except that
I've inserted a navigation bar at the top with some local links to
the rest of our PR Watch web site. This means that I've had to insert
a line of code into Skin.php, SkinNostalgia.php, and
SkinCologneBlue.php. The line reads as follows:
$s .= wfMsg( "navbar" );
In Skin.php, I put this line just before the line that says
$s .= $this->topLinks();
The actual text and HTML for the navbar appears in Language.php,
where I inserted a definition of "navbar" in the $wgAllMessagesEn
array.
Would it be possible to insert my line of code into Wikipedia's
"official" version of pages Skin.php, SkinNostalgia.php and
SkinCologneBlue.php, along with a definition of "navbar" as a null
string in Language.php? This would make it a little easier for me to
keep my copy of the scripts harmonized with future revisions. Also,
the "navbar" might provide a useful hook to other people who want to
customize the interface.
(2) For the time being, I'm abandoning my original idea of having
separate input templates for different types of articles (e.g.,
articles about people, organizations, etc.). However, I've given a
little more thought to the idea of adding object-typing and
structure, and I wonder if perhaps this could be done through some
additions to the Wiki syntax. Perhaps "::" could be used to specify
an object TYPE, and "->" could be used to specify an object PROPERTY.
Examples:
[[person::Abraham Lincoln]]
[[employee->Archie Bunker]]
In addition, each Wikipedia article could be considered a de facto
object definition, with some syntax that enables explicit
specification of object properties and superclasses. For example, you
might have an article about "person" which includes the following
code:
[[property->date_of_birth]]
[[property->gender]]
A separate article about "Nobel Prize winner" might include the following text:
[[superclass->person]]
[[property->year_of_award]]
[[property->award_category]]
These definitions wouldn't appear in the display versions of
articles, but they could be useful in other ways, e.g., customizing
the input templates for new articles or data mining. For example, an
article about Albert Einstein might include text which says:
[[object_type->Nobel_Prize_winner]]
'''Albert Einstein''' (born [[date_of_birth->March 14, 1879]]), was a
[[physicist]] who first proposed the [[theory of relativity]]. He was
awarded the Nobel Prize in [[year_of_award->1921]]. Notwithstanding
his personal pacifism, he supported the scientific research that led
to the development of the [[weapon_of_mass_destruction::atom bomb]].
Finally, perhaps there could also be some sort of syntax for
automatically inserting a list of all objects of a given type. For
example, the bottom of the article titled "Nobel Prize winner" could
have a line at the bottom that lists all articles with this object
type, sorted by year of award.
What do you think? Is there any merit to these ideas? I'm still a
Wikipedia newbie, so I apologize if this all seems half-baked.
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------
>No bug. On saving, it removesblank lines and spaces at the beginning and
>end of the article.Leading blank lines (and the ones at the end, too) look
>ugly, and removing them saves disk space ;-)
Ah, so you just can't have articles that begin with preformatted text.
*grin* I understand removing blank lines; but in a generic, general sense,
it's probably a good idea to allow articles the ability to start out with
preformatted text.
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I got the "floating left" sidebar working all right (only tested
Mozilla, though...)
Looks really nice, especially with Brion's improved font!
Concerning the long sidebar:
What could go IMHO is:
* New Pages
* Image list
* Statistics
* Bug reports
* Eding help (already on every edit page)
The whole "Page info" section is on the page bottom anyway, so that
could go as well if needed.
Also, "upload file" should be moved to some other section, so it will be
visible on edit pages as well.
My two Euro-cents ;-)
Magnus
Inside ampersands that are part of character references inside <pre> ...
</pre> are now being translated to & as though they're not a part of an
explicit character reference. I'm experiencing this at [[m:Wikitax]].
For example, try doing:
<pre>
<pre> ... </pre>
</pre>
Okay, I'm done now,
Derek
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What's with the Tex feature update? Anything final yet?
(I'm only asking because I'd like to use my new Recent Changes toy, but
I'm afraid to break something when installing the current CVS, because
of the Tex stuff).
Magnus