Let's revisit the basic way that Mediawiki lays out media and content.
It has worked well enough for twenty years, but perhaps we can do
better.
In particular, I would like to be able to (a) make Wikimedia projects
looks Really Beautiful (b) on a variety of different devices and
formats.
Mobile and print are the forerunners here: in both cases we'd like
more flexibility to lay out infoboxes, media, tables, and content in
not-strictly-linear ways:
1) We'd like to be able to tag lead images, and use them more
generally (backgrounds for page titles, previews, etc)
2) Infoboxes, references, footnotes, etc want to be untethered from
their source location in the content and moved around -- for example,
to sidebars or popups on mobile; to the footer or dedicated pages in
print.
3) We would like to be able to crop and scale images better, but need
focal point information or a box around critical regions of the image.
(If the article is about the sun, and the photo is of a sunny day,
cropping the sun out would be bad. Other images have critical
features at the edges of the image we don't want to lose.) We
currently have a single option "thumb", and a single user-specified
scaling factor, meant for accessibility --- but an accessible size
will differ on different devices, and the scaling factor doesn't apply
to all images, only to those using "thumb".
4) We need more semantic information about images in order to make
better layouts: in print, is this a "wide" image appropriate for
spanning across multiple columns, or a "feature" image appropriate for
having a page to itself? Is this a meaningful parallel grouping of
images (ie, before and after) which shouldn't be broken up (but could
be arranged either horizontally or vertically, or perhaps with a
slider)? Should this image be laid out inline (rarely) or can it
float to a more aesthetic location?
5) Even text content might be unmoored -- why can't we have pull
quotes or sidebars in our articles?
6) What else? What other features of magazine, newpaper, or
encyclopedia design are we missing?
>From a technical perspective, I'd like to move eventually toward a
system with greater separation of layout and content (think of
something like adobe pagemaker), where changes to layout can be made
without editing the article text. But I'd also like to make sure that
the technical issues don't overshadow the actual goal:
* What beautiful designs would you like for article content?
* What tools could we build to enable these designs?
Eventually we'd like to boil this down into a concrete design for a
better image styling system, which seems like a reasonable first step
in revamping what mediawiki can do for designers. That RFC is
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T90914 -- ideally the RFC will be
guided by a concrete design for a specific article, say,
http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Moon, so that the
implementation of the RFC can focus on building the capabilities
needed to execute that specific design. That way we're certain we're
building something useful and beautiful for designers and readers, not
just implementing something whose PHP code seems elegant.
--scott
--
(http://cscott.net)
Hey, all. I've noticed a common trend is to use grey text for your
emails. I know it's nice to make things prettier, but some of us don't
have terribly good eyes, or screens, or both. Could you please use a
little more contrast?
Thanks!
-I
On 9/30/15, bawolff <bawolff+wn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 5:16 PM, Nick Wilson (Quiddity) <
> nwilson(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 3:56 PM, Legoktm <legoktm.wikipedia(a)gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > On 09/30/2015 03:39 PM, May Tee-Galloway wrote:
>> > > I've set my emails to be "Plain text mode," but I notice it still
>> > > goes
>> > > back to non-plain text mode.
>> >
>> > Yes, it would be really nice if a listadmin could set this list to
>> > plain
>> > text mode :)
>> >
>> >
>> Done. Hopefully successfully. (I flipped the top and bottom options in
>> this
>> screenshot, to "yes" - http://i.imgur.com/4ocDFMH.png )
>> Could a non-listadmin please send a (very) small image attachment, as a
>> reply to this, to test that that still works? Thanks.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Design mailing list
>> Design(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
>>
>
> Fancy Fancy
> * text...*
>
> *some italics*
>
> *--*
> *-bawolff*
>
I sent an email with fancy formatting. But its not in archives. Did it
go through. Was the formatting stripped?
So many questions!
--
-bawolff
You may have heard about the in-progress work on the Code of Conduct for
Wikimedia technical spaces
(https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_conduct_for_technical_spaces/Draft).
It is currently in draft form, and we are in the process of finalizing
the intro, "Principles", "Expected behavior" and "Unacceptable behavior"
sections.
An earlier version of these sections (except for "Expected behavior")
reached consensus.
However, there is now a new draft, and you can weigh in on whether to
use it instead:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Code_of_conduct_for_technical_spaces/Dr…
.
I will continue to ask for your feedback as we discuss the remaining
sections later.
Thanks,
Matt Flaschen
On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 6:48 AM, Juan de Vojníkov <juandevojnikov(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hello folks,
>
> I am looking for someone/institution which is applying a Universal Design,
> by the means of removing all barriers for people with disabilities. Could
> you give me any contacts, case studies or links?
>
> Thank you very much!
>
>
> Juandev
>
>
>
CCing design list.
Hi Juandev, could you give us a few more details on what you're aiming for,
as a goal?
Are you looking for something to help MediaWiki development become more
accessible, or simply for anything related to online accessibility? Or
offline, too?
If MediaWiki: There's a compilation of the core links at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Accessibility_and_usability_cleanup
If general online accessibility: You might be looking for something like
the work by FLOE and GPII and IDRC. eg
http://www.floeproject.org/prefsEditors.html (click the top-right "Show
display preferences" button, and watch the video) plus everything linked
from there..
If general accessibility: I'm not sure, beyond googling for it.
Hope that helps,
Quiddity
Hi,
I was hoping to participate in Outreachy[1] Round 11 (Dec-Mar 2015) on a
Design project. Outreachy is an internship program over 3 months on
programming, design, documentation, marketing, or other kinds of
contributions. A project in Outreachy needs a mentor and an intern. Often a
mentor and a co-mentor.
I found Possible-Tech-Projects[2] in Phabricator which has a large number
of development related possible projects related to MediaWiki, but I was
unable to find any Design related projects. Is there a project you think I
could work on and you'd be willing to mentor me on it? I'm interested in
Hovercards[3] and Night display[4], but I'm open to others too!
[1] https://gnome.org/outreachy/
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/possible-tech-projects/
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_Features/Hovercards
[4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T112162#1630351
Hi May,
Thanks for the helpful tips :)
I have already begun going through the list of easy+design related tasks
filtered by Phabricator, but thank you for the link, as it brought to my
notice the "Mobile-Web-Design" tag and "Design Research Backlog" which I
did not know of :)
Regards
(adding Design list)
On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 9:06 AM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com>
wrote:
> Whatever happened to Winter? It's not coming, AFAICT...
>
Yes. See the "Winter" thread on the design mailing list:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/design/2015-July/thread.html
There are three avenues for appearance development
* User JS+CSS and gadgets.
* Iterate on Vector as Beta features (sadly "Compact personal bar" and
"Fixed header" are no longer offered as Beta Features due to bugs).
* Prototype and refine new skins.
Regards,
> On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 2:58 PM Ricordisamoa <ricordisamoa(a)openmailbox.org>
> wrote:
>
> > There is some work about getting the mobile skin on desktop (T71366
> > <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T71366>), and Blueprint
> > <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Blueprint> powers the Living Style
> > Guide.
> > However, no matter how ancient Vector may look, the little updates it
> > has received over the years make me think it isn't that bad for those
> > who use it.
> >
> > Il 08/09/2015 19:53, Thomas Mulhall ha scritto:
> > > Hi this is a question but shoulden Wikimedia wikis such as Wikipedia
> > be updated with a user friendly design. Currently vector is coming out of
> > date because now a days you see sites with bruitiful colours not old ones
> > as they were in 2010 when vector came out. We could create another skin
> to
> > replace vector as we did with monobook or update vector with a new look
> > that has bold colours and goes along with mediawiki code and is also
> mobile
> > optimised even though we have the mobilefrontend extension some users may
> > not want to install instead hoping the skin is mobile optimised.
>
--
=S Page WMF Tech writer
The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work
It's a beautiful, elegant solution that gets it all wrong, and it's time to
move on
http://deep.design/the-hamburger-menu/
