My views are most closely aligned with Ryan to be honest and historically I've lost 3rd party users to mediawiki instances because of how it looks, and the choice isn't great out there. I'm yet to meet someone outside our community who likes how Wikipedia looks, that's always the first thing they complain about. I fear we suffer from Stockholm syndrome working in our codebase that we forget about those voices that don't get heard. We are the .001%!
Whilst I'm glad to see the patch lego pointed to merged, I would wage money that $wgVectorResponsive when set to true would cause a lot of backlash (some people just don't like responsive sites [1]) and I predict it will need to become a separate skin called VectorResponsive to keep 'everyone happy'.
I think it's okay to iterate, but from my many experiences in the mediawiki skin world, you have to leave the status quo as an option and make the new skin experience opt in. Even then it's hard to get things out of opt in mode - personal compact toolbar was well received on the most part but a complete hack in implementation yet I saw no progress in consolidating it into our experience.
Vector is not evolving, otherwise it would have happened already. The only changes to it in the past 3 years have been badly received typography changes and minor tweaks.
Traditionally, more skins has created more headaches, but maybe it's time to rethink this infrastructure [2] and encourage a more abundant selection of skins on our wikis. From my perspective the lack of competition in the Wikipedia skin world is preventing innovation. FWIW I'd love to have a go at making a new skin based on Winter's ideas in my spare time with a fixed header, but given that I have no confidence it will ever get on the cluster I have no motivation to do this. Where is Apex deployed for example [3]? Why can't I try this out on Wikipedia and see if I prefer the experience?
The closest thing I see to MediaWiki are Wikia wiki's and Wordpress and both of those seem to have a much more active and healthy skin ecosystem. Is this something we want to recreate or are we saying that Vector is the only skin MediaWiki will ever need? If that's the case, I'm troubled.
In MobileFrontend the Minerva skin was created and I would estimate is the most actively developed of skins at the moment. We make decisions that people don't like, to keep the interface as simple and uncluttered as we possibly can, as that's what it's designed for. People can choose Vector if they prefer that experience on mobile, and I truly hope they'll be able to try a responsive version of Vector too. I'm aware some people hate it but at least it's trying to create a drastically different Wikipedia site experience and I'd like to see more skins like this. Choice is an important aspect of any open source project.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=i+hate+responsive+sites&oq=i+hate+respon... [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Redo_skin_framework [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Apex
On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Legoktm legoktm.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/21/2015 02:38 PM, Ryan Lane wrote:
There's not really a conversation. The UX lead is saying "Winter is dead, let's continue with the iterations on Vector", though there's no real iteration going on.
I'd consider https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/220667/ to be a good start of iterating on Vector.
-- Legoktm
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