Greetings!
Can you help us create a better multimedia experience on Wikipedia and its sister sites?
If you are interested, we'd like to invite you to join a special Multimedia Meetup at the Wikimedia Foundation, this Monday, December 9 at 6:30pm PST.
This one-hour event will bring together dozens of developers and community members to discuss how we can use images, sounds and videos to help people learn more effectively on our sites.
To join us, simply sign up here:
http://www.meetup.com/wikimedia-tech/events/123456892/
If you know anyone else outside WMF whom you think would be interested, you are welcome to spread the word in your community -- the more, the merrier :)
We will start our meeting by presenting a vision for multimedia in 2016 and ask you how we can improve it.
We will then demo and discuss these new projects together:
* media viewer
* file feedback
* new video formats
* campaign tools
As a group, we will brainstorm new ways to view, contribute, curate, discover and use media files on Wikipedia, and grow our audio-visual knowledge base in the process.
This is a great opportunity to plan our next steps together and network with other like-minded community members. And we'll be serving free drinks and pizza to make this even more fun for you. :)
Images, sounds and videos can engage users more deeply than text articles, and better support their individual learning styles. To that end, we aim to help more users to collaborate through multimedia -- by improving their viewing experience, supporting their media contributions, and making it easier to use media in articles.
We look forward to your advice on how to make this vision happen together.
Thanks for your consideration. We hope to speak with you soon. :)
All the best,
Fabrice
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia
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
Its my great pleasure to welcome Moiz Syed to the User Experience team.
Moiz joins us from Hipmunk, where he was integral in building their design
team from zero to a team of four. While there he was responsible for the
user experience both on their mobile application and desktop site.
Moiz joins the Wikimedia Foundation as a User Experience Designer, and will
be working with the team on everything from mobile, analytics, core
features, multimedia, and growth.
Moiz was the first designer at Hipmunk, where he most recently lead the
effort to redesign their mobile app from the ground up, coinciding with the
iOS 7 launch. In addition to interaction design, Moiz is interested in
information visualization, design for accessibility, privacy and social
activism.
Moiz has worked at startups, consultancies, and in-house at companies such
as Citrix and IBM. Moiz will be functioning as an UX designer on the team,
however his visual design, data visualization, and prototyping skills will
be integral to the continued success of our team and our projects.
He is excited to be part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission. When he’s
not at work Moiz is busy volunteering as a designer for activist groups
like Private Manning Support Network and Code Pink. He also enjoys reading,
documentary photography, and making loud annoying sounds on
his MicroKorg synth.
*Jared Zimmerman * \\ Director of User Experience \\ Wikimedia Foundation
Hi,
Are there any written guidelines for creating images and icons for
MediaWiki? I'd love to add some best practices there about
internationalization, bidirectionality, etc.
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.