Good to see this isn't dead.
I agree that a monochrome icon that matches the other work being done would
be awesome.
It's sort of been on the back-burner for a while, but mostly because it's
not as trivial as it looks.
The reason this is a tricky change is because the output of the parser
currently places the section edit link and the heading text in the wrong
order. That is, the section edit link comes first (and is floated right)
and the heading text comes second. Attached is a screenshot of the DOM
structure as it is now on Wikipedia.
It's important to note that the experiment I ran was a JavaScript hack that
rearranged DOM elements on the fly. The correct way to do this (as long as
we are busting out the "productized" word) is to make these changes before
we send the HTML out to the client. This means making changes to the
parser's output. This could
Bug #11270 <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11270> calls for
this change to be made, and there's even a patch (but it's 3 years old, so
don't get your hopes up). The patch changes the output of the parser, which
affects all skins, and then adjusts the CSS for non-Vector skins to make
them look the way they used to. Bug
#41729<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41729> calls
for the experimental stuff I did a while back to be cleaned up - basically
what you are calling for now. There's also
#11555<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11555>which
relates to this issue, and may be solved by whatever we do to resolve
the other 2 bugs.
- Trevor
On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 3:13 PM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org
On 11/13/2012 06:07 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
Hey all,
This is a note of prior explanation about a small design enhancement
upcoming.
*## Background*
You might remember that part of the original Vector plans was to redesign
section edit links to make them more accessible to new contributors.
(Look
at the Acai release on
usability.wikimedia.org).
Later on, Trevor collaborated with the Community Dept. to run an A/B test
on English Wikipedia of his redesign, which conclusively showed that the
new look increased both clicks and the net number of edits by a
significant
amount.
At the time, there was no big push to productize the changes, but the
code
has been sitting around inside the ClickTracking
extension. My team
became
the de facto maintainers of ClickTracking since
we were its most heavy
users, and are now deprecating it in favor of EventLogging.
Skipping the big analytics discussion there, suffice it to say that we
don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, and are working to
productize Trevor's road tested new design for section edit links in
Vector. (No change in Monobook et al.)
Compare the old to something much like the new:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/03/09/ui-design-experiments/
*## Plan of action*
Here's the plan for execution, which I've discussed with Howie Fung and
some of the design team so far:
1. We'll deploy the current version of the section edit redesign,
which
you can see at
http://piramido.wmflabs.org/wiki/Hipster_ipsum. I've
committed to handling the necessary community announcements and final
QA.
2. For the second iteration, Munaf and Vibha
will work on a redesigned
icon to fit with Agora style, and we'll explore the idea Munaf had --
the
icons appearing only on hover in the section.
It's a good one.
The current iteration is perhaps not perfect, but it was tested with
users
and showed an improved conversion across the
board. It also appears to be
using the previous localization message, so we can safely deploy it
everywhere Vector is in use.
The caveat Howie and I have discussed is the fact that no quality
measurements were done on the increase in editing. This change is really
a
basic necessity as far as Product is concerned,
so we aren't going to
make
that a blocker, but should be prepared to roll it
back if it makes the
wikis explode with vandalism etc.
Steven, this is great news and I'm looking forward to seeing it live on
our sites! Thanks for taking this the last few steps to completion.
And thanks to everyone who did the design, coding, analysis, and other
thinking on this change.
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
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