http://designatwikipedia.tumblr.com/post/62048718932/thoughts-on-humanizing…
"With humanizing articles, we have two objectives:
-Creating awareness about the editors and their interests on Wikipedia.
-Promoting connections within the community using shared interests."
The post shares some ideas and mockups and notes, "While the details are
being refined, comments on the general direction towards contributions
or alternate ideas would be super appreciated."
(By the way, after this email, I'm unsubscribing from the design list as
I prep for my sabbatical - more info at
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-August/071542.html
. If you need to talk about Wikimedia technical community stuff or
communication before January, please consult Quim Gil, qgil at wikimedia
dot org, or Guillaume Paumier, gpaumier at wikimedia dot org. Thanks!
Looking forward to coming back in January.)
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi,
So, since there are a lot of discussions about typography lately, I guess I
have to chime in with internationalization considerations.
tl;dr:
1. Bug 57045 should be resolved.
2. Typography changes shouldn't be made default in any language without
testing and positive approval.
The long version:
The discussions about typography need to take into account not just the
Latin alphabet, but other alphabets as well. Even within the Latin alphabet
there can be variations; for example, Vietnamese and some other languages
use a very large number of đìâċṛįṭīçś, which may require use of different
styles.
Generally, *any* significant typography changes must be tested in all
scripts and nothing should be enabled by default in any project without a
positive approval from the community or at least from Language Engineering.
This is not as heavy and bureaucratic as it sounds, however :)
What do I mean by "all scripts"? Basically scripts like "Latin",
"Cyrillic", "Devanagari", etc. Their number is much smaller than the ~300
languages of MediaWiki. An easy step to properly creating these groups
would be resolving bug 57045 [1], where I propose grouping languages by
script names.
And here are some actual basic style considerations:
* minimum line-height: usually not important for Latin, but often needed
for languages of South and South-East Asia.
* minimum letter size: languages with complex glyphs and ligatures are
usually completely unreadable under 12, and may even need a size of over
14. Examples are Chinese, and many languages of India.
* underline: underline is quite bad for writing systems where the letters
often go below the baseline, such as Arabic. (This is actually implemented
in a very hacky way in getStyles() in
includes/resourceloader/ResourceLoaderUserCSSPrefsModule.php and should be
refactored.)
* uppercase and small caps: this may be useful and nice for Latin,
Cyrillic, Greek and Armenian, but other writing systems don't have it.
Depending on it for adding elegance or for emphasis is not a good idea.
These are the basics. Obviously, there may be more considerations.
Another relevant link:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Internationalization/Styling_and_typography
[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57045
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Hi,
Beta features have icons to represent them at Special:Preferences.
They usually show a schematic representation of a MediaWiki page with a
logo in the top left corner, and this of course means that they should be
flipped for RTL languages.
Some of them are trivial - just a horizontal flip.
Some of them are less trivial - for example, in the one for the
VisualEditor formula editing I flipped the image and then flipped the Sigma
icon inside it so it would still look like Σ and not flipped.
Some of them are even less trivial, for example the icons for the font
style experiments. It shows the Latin letter A, and it's weird to show a
Latin letter in the beginning of a right-to-left text. Luckily, there are
only two major right-to-left scripts, so I made one icon for Hebrew and one
for Arabic (my sincerest apologies to speakers of Divehi and Syriac).
Some relevant sample commits:
* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/94379/
* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/94269/
* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/94423/
* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/98159/
In any case, I'd like to request that the designers who make these icons
would do it from the start. My Inkscape skills miraculously worked for this
till now and there were almost no complaints about my work. Still, when it
comes to graphics software I am not even an amateur, and this should
probably be done by professionals. More importantly, a real designer would
do it with a consideration for RTL from the start.
As always, if you have any questions about internationalizing and bidifying
these icons or any others, please ask Language engineering at the
mediawiki-i18n mailing list or the IRC channel of the same name.
Thanks!
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
I had two topics I wanted us to discuss and agree upon that are
causing lots of friction in mobile development and I would like us to
resolve in current designs and future designs. (Feel free to forward
to other mailing lists)
Articles Vs Pages Vs <insert word here>
####################################
Recently all instances of the word 'article(s)' was switched with
'content pages' / 'pages'. This problem keeps recurring in our design
and is starting to become a nuisance. I see both sides here - 3rd
parties and even our own projects use our software in a different way
- sometimes pages are articles, sometimes they are definitions,
sometimes destinations etc etc.
However the word 'content page' and page is extremely ambiguous and
can be confusing.
One good example is the watchlist view on mobile - it provides the
ability to filter feeds by namespace:
This i18n change changed the word 'article' to 'content pages'. In
this context it makes no sense. Programmatically what it actually
means is show me only pages from the 'Main namespace' but to a reader
the word 'articles' is arguably more understandable than 'content
pages'. I would actually like us to continue using 'articles' but
explore ways other instances can customise this - e.g. switch the word
'articles' to other words based on what their project is about. It
would be nice for wikibooks to use the word 'books' for instance, and
wikitionary 'words' or 'definitions'. Is this feasible and worth
exploring? I feel like using the word pages at the benefit of
generalisation seriously damages the benefit of clear and easy to
understand language.
Limiting word length in mobile
#####################
In addition to this the patch in question brought up a second topic:
word length on mobile. On the watchlist view we have several tabs as
illustrated in this question which are optimised for single words (and
potentially can be truncated using the ellipsis method if necessary)
http://imgur.com/Jiv0XPJ
As you can see in the diagram - 2 words do not work very well in this
kind of view. I suggested a qqq constraint to limit translations to
single words - https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/97935/ - do we think
these sorts of constraints are okay for mobile? Another approach to do
a similar design would be to use icons, but icons in themselves have
even greater problems for translation.
I might be wrong but I think the purpose of the bold text in this situation
was the activity being undertaken as Sankarshan suggests. I'm sure the
design team will correct me if this is not the case.
On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 8:31 AM, sankarshan <foss.mailinglists(a)gmail.com>wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 9:31 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
> <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> > In English, the message mobile-frontend-editor-previewing says:
> > "'''Previewing''' $1", where $1 is a page title.
> >
> > I suppose that the bold text is important for design, so I have a
> question:
> > is *everything* except the page title supposed to be bold or is just the
> > word "previewing" supposed to be bold? In Hebrew, and maybe in some other
> > languages a preposition is needed between "Previewing" and the title.
>
> Would considering to make $1 ie. the page title to be bold an option?
> Previewing is an activity (a verb/action) that I'd be making on the
> subject - the page. So, highlighting where the activity is being
> undertaken is a consideration.
>
>
> --
> sankarshan mukhopadhyay
> <https://twitter.com/#!/sankarshan>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Mobile-l mailing list
> Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
>
--
Jon Robson
http://jonrobson.me.uk
@rakugojon
Cross-posting as an FYI
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steven Walling <swalling(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 5:15 PM
Subject: Small update to Search design
To: Coordination of technology deployments across languages/projects <
wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hey all,
Thanks to Chad and Bartosz, https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/94276/ has
been merged, and with the next MediaWiki core releases you should see two
things:
1. the input box on the search page will be larger
2. the button will be a larger, blue button similar to the style seen on
login, create account, and some other forms
You can see a screenshot of what this looks like at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Search-UI-minor-tweak.png or by
searching on Beta Labs (http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/)
--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
cc. design
On 21 Nov 2013 20:02, "Amir E. Aharoni" <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In English, the message mobile-frontend-editor-previewing says: "'''Previewing'''
> $1", where $1 is a page title.
>
> I suppose that the bold text is important for design, so I have a
> question: is *everything* except the page title supposed to be bold or is
> just the word "previewing" supposed to be bold? In Hebrew, and maybe in
> some other languages a preposition is needed between "Previewing" and the
> title.
>
> In general, if such design considerations are important, they should be in
> the qqq context documentation.
>
> Thanks!
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> “We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
>
> _______________________________________________
> Mobile-l mailing list
> Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
>
>
On 11/20/2013 07:40 AM, Andrew Gray wrote:
> I think "external sites" isn't quite what this is proposing - it's
> generating crosslinks to Wikidata and Commons, and potentially through
> those to alternate-language versions. It's still remaining within the
> general ecosystem of our projects, and if we signpost that clearly I
> don't see a problem.
I think Jared is referring to the link to Reasonator
(http://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/).
However, this is on Labs, not just a random external site. That means
worst comes to worst, it could be disabled if it violated the Labs policies.
It's also currently an opt-in user script (you have to explicitly add
code to your user JavaScript), and it only sends you to Reasonator if
you click a link.
There are similar links to Labs and the Toolserver in the default
interface, e.g. at the bottom of Special:Contributions.
The reason I CCed design is because of the request for a logo.
Matt Flaschen
