On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 2:54 PM, Mark Holmquist <mtraceur@member.fsf.org> wrote:
I was pointed, this morning, at a blog post [1] by Molly White, who has
been an editor and technical contributor for some time now. She also did
GSoC with us under Matt Walker.

The post describes her system for making long talk pages easier to read.
I think what she describes (and what she clarified for me when I asked)
could easily be turned into another BetaFeatures experiement in Jon's
VectorBeta extension. I'm looking for some thoughts on the concept, and
maybe a volunteer to help out with the implementation.

This would be particularly nice because we haven't, as yet, had a feature
driven by volunteers that was a BetaFeatures thing. Another candidate I'm
eyeing is Daniel Schwen's "favorite images" gadget, but that's a ways
off IMO.

[1] http://blog.mollywhite.net/easyreader/

The part of the post that sticks out for me is, "Wikipedia, with its 10pt font, does a good job of displaying large amounts of information in small amounts of space. It does a poor job of allowing you to read said information, particularly in such large quantities, without your eyes glazing over." 

The good news is that there are some revisions to the typography refresh impending that will make people who also agree with Molly happy. Some are merged by Jon in VectorBeta, and a few more are coming early next week after we do a bit of polishing. 

I think Molly is overall correct, and it's a good design direction. But I'm not sure if we need to create a new beta feature. The ideal case is where we don't need a special "readability" mode, but rather that all of Wikipedia has easy to read typography. Flow is actually a good step in that direction, and I also think we should iterate boldly on the typography beta work that's been done. Jared, Job, Vibha, and others are willing to do that. They've actually thrown out some of the more disliked elements of the typography beta feature, and are about to try some more which I'm sure will get people talking. 

Stay tuned... 

--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager