Forwarding because I think that this announcement might be of interest on
other lists too.
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Ryan Schmidt <skizzerz(a)gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 6:01 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] New Request for Comment: Skin templating
To: <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi all!
I have recently started a new RFC on revamping how skins are created, to
improve usability in creating skins, extend skins with new UI (in
Extensions), and give more power and flexibility for system administrators
to customise skins for their own sites without causing undue burden on
upgrades.
Details are on the RFC page on mediawiki.org, linked below. I welcome all
comments and questions, as I believe that these changes will greatly
improve the current state of our skin system. I prefer that comments and
questions are collected on the mediawiki.org page so that we can keep them
all in one place, but I’ll answer anything here as well 😊
Phabricator task: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T217158Mediawiki.org page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Skin_templating
Regards,
Skizzerz
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
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(Cannot come up with a better subject line, sorry.)
I'm working on improving the mediawiki.org frontpage in
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki/Homepage_improvements…
In the previous phase we defined the audiences to address.
The current phase is about defining which information and links to
present to each audience on https://www.mediawiki.org .
The next phase in early January will be about defining the layout.
Ideally it's informative, attractive, responsive.
Does anyone have guidelines, tips & tricks, recommendations to share?
Probably one 'box' for each audience like currently, but also working
fine on smaller screens. My minimal knowledge of CSS makes me think of
terms like "grid" and "flex-box" [1] but I'm not sure what's best (plus
how much custom CSS to add to the frontpage though on the other hand
the use of custom templates is maybe already an existing equivalent?).
Opinions? Any examples?
Thanks in advance,
andre
[1] Uh, Vector and flex-box: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T120818
--
Andre Klapper | Bugwrangler / Developer Advocate
https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
Hi everyone,
I'm excited to share that our annual survey about Wikimedia communities is
now published!
This survey included 170 questions and reaches over 4,000 community
members across
four audiences: Contributors, Affiliate organizers, Program Organizers, and
Volunteer Developers. This survey helps us hear from the experience of
Wikimedians from across the movement so that teams are able to use
community feedback in their planning and their work. This survey also helps
us learn about long term changes in communities, such as community health
or demographics.
The report is available on meta:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement_Insights/2018_Report
For this survey, we worked with 11 teams to develop the questions. Once the
results were analyzed, we spent time with each team to help them understand
their results. Most teams have already identified how they will use the
results to help improve their work to support you.
The report could be useful for your work in the Wikimedia movement as well!
What are you learning from the data? Take some time to read the report and
share your feedback on the talk pages. We have also published a blog that
you can read.[1]
We are hosting a livestream presentation[2] on September 20 at 1600 UTC.
Hope to see you there!
Feel free to email me directly with any questions.
All the best,
Edward
[1]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/2018/09/13/what-we-learned-surveying-4000-c…
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGQtWFP9Cjc
--
Edward Galvez
Evaluation Strategist, Surveys
Learning & Evaluation
Community Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation
--
Edward Galvez
Evaluation Strategist, Surveys
Learning & Evaluation
Community Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation
<tl;dr>: Read https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/Mentors and
add your name to the mentors table and start tagging #GCI-2018 tasks.
We'll need MANY mentors and MANY tasks, otherwise we cannot make it.
This also includes design tasks. :)
Google Code-in is an annual contest for 13-17 year old students. It
will take place from Oct23 to Dec13. It's not only about coding:
we also need tasks about design, docs, outreach/research, QA.
Last year, 300 students worked on 760 tasks supported by 51 mentors.
For some achievements from last round, see
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/03/20/wikimedia-google-code-in-2017/
While we wait whether Wikimedia will get accepted:
* You have small, self-contained bugs you'd like to see fixed?
* Your documentation needs specific improvements?
* Your user interface has some smaller design issues?
* Your Outreachy/Summer of Code project welcomes small tweaks?
* You'd enjoy helping someone port your template to Lua?
* Your gadget code uses some deprecated API calls?
* You have tasks in mind that welcome some research?
Note that "beginner tasks" (e.g. "Set up Vagrant") and generic
tasks are very welcome (like "Choose and fix 2 PHP7 issues from
the list in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T120336" style).
We also have more than 400 unassigned open #easy tasks listed:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/HCyOonSbFn.z/#R
Can you mentor some of those tasks in your area?
Please take a moment to find / update [Phabricator etc.] tasks in your
project(s) which would take an experienced contributor 2-3 hours. Read
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/Mentors
, ask if you have any questions, and add your name to
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/2018#List_of_Wikimedia_mentors
(If you have mentored before and have a good overview of our
infrastructure: We also need more organization admins! See
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/Admins )
Thanks (as we cannot run this without your help),
andre
--
Andre Klapper | Bugwrangler / Developer Advocate
https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
Hello Research, Mobile, and Design colleagues,
In case other people are interested who didn't attend the August Wikimedia
Activities Meeting, there was a design research presentation in the meeting
regarding personas of mobile Wikimedia users: https://youtu.be/yZPZmRQnkXU
On a related note, I would like to learn more about design research,
including about how design research interfaces with analytics and UX
design, and I would like to request that WMF have an office hour on this
topic.
Regards,
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
I thought that this video, published in May 2018, was somewhat interesting
and I am sharing it in case others are also interested. The presenter uses
a change of design of Wikipedia's front page search box from 2010 (see
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/06/15/usability-why-did-we-move-the-search-…)
as an example, though I would hope that the lesson from this video isn't
that it's okay to frequently disrupt the workflows of existing users with
design changes regardless of the amount of complaints from existing users.
The main points that I drew from this presentation are that interfaces
should be intuitive and should have relatively light cognitive load. Those
points may sound obvious to experienced UX designers, but may be of
interest to people whose areas of expertise are in other domains.
I also appreciated that the presenter shared an example of a situation in
which people said one thing in surveys but behaved in the opposite way in
practice.
Here is the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxzK4sWfvH8
Regards,
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )