Hi!
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/
Thanks,
I don’t know how much effort we should spend trying to make talk pages easier to read when we’ve got Flow on the main burner.
On Jan 2, 2014, at 2:54 PM, Mark Holmquist mtraceur@member.fsf.org wrote:
Hi!
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/
Thanks,
-- Mark Holmquist Software Engineer, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation mtraceur@member.fsf.org https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist _______________________________________________ Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
--- Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
fixed bar header on the other hand... On 2 Jan 2014 18:20, "Brandon Harris" bharris@wikimedia.org wrote:
I don’t know how much effort we should spend trying to make talkpages easier to read when we’ve got Flow on the main burner.
On Jan 2, 2014, at 2:54 PM, Mark Holmquist mtraceur@member.fsf.org wrote:
Hi!
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/
Thanks,
-- Mark Holmquist Software Engineer, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation mtraceur@member.fsf.org https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist _______________________________________________ Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
On Thu, Jan 02, 2014 at 06:20:01PM -0800, Brandon Harris wrote:
I don't know how much effort we should spend trying to make talk pages easier to read when we've got Flow on the main burner.
The beauty of this is, it's a fast solution that we can push out and not need to do much work on it. The community is pretty good about responding to calls for feedback on BetaFeatures, and JS/CSS fixes for something this small will likely not take much engineering resources.
Also I'm not sure this would be *only* helpful on Talk pages, I think very dense pages could benefit from this too - stuff that's really heavy on detail and prose.
I’m going to go with “less change control and fewer broken promises”. We roll this out to beta features, and that’s all that is ever going to happen with it - it will die a slow death there, because it’s unlikely we will ever roll it out to production. Not because it’s good, but because we need to maintain a solid process of change control management. That is: as few changes as possible.
In this case, this is a change that would be obviated in short order, and we’d have a crazy heavy political fight over it in the mean time.
(Note that I love the direction this goes in. I just am thinking strategically.)
On Jan 2, 2014, at 6:38 PM, Mark Holmquist mtraceur@member.fsf.org wrote:
On Thu, Jan 02, 2014 at 06:20:01PM -0800, Brandon Harris wrote:
I don't know how much effort we should spend trying to make talk pages easier to read when we've got Flow on the main burner.
The beauty of this is, it's a fast solution that we can push out and not need to do much work on it. The community is pretty good about responding to calls for feedback on BetaFeatures, and JS/CSS fixes for something this small will likely not take much engineering resources.
Also I'm not sure this would be *only* helpful on Talk pages, I think very dense pages could benefit from this too - stuff that's really heavy on detail and prose.
-- Mark Holmquist Software Engineer, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation mtraceur@member.fsf.org https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist _______________________________________________ Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
--- Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Mark Holmquist wrote:
The beauty of this is, it's a fast solution that we can push out and not need to do much work on it. The community is pretty good about responding to calls for feedback on BetaFeatures, and JS/CSS fixes for something this small will likely not take much engineering resources.
Agreed. From what I can tell, easyreader is just a bit of styling. It reminds me of the Typography refresh/update beta feature, so making this another beta feature or part of the same beta feature might work.
easyreader could also easily be a JavaScript gadget or even a new MediaWiki skin, if you wanted. There are lots of options here, but none are particularly difficult from a technical point-of-view.
Changing the implicit ?action=view is nice, but it may also help to focus on ?action=edit as well. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/45300 discusses adding a "zen mode" to the wikitext ("source") editor. A similar mode could be added for reading (cf. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/14501).
These are fun projects and none would be very difficult to implement, if anyone is interested.
MZMcBride
On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 2:54 PM, Mark Holmquist mtraceur@member.fsf.orgwrote:
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.
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...
On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 12:25 AM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Jared, Job, Vibha, and others are willing to do that.
Ha. Jon. Not Job.
2014/1/3 Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org
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.
When you say *all of Wikipedia* does it include all languages of Wikipedia? -Niklas
On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 12:45 AM, Niklas Laxström niklas.laxstrom@gmail.comwrote:
When you say *all of Wikipedia* does it include all languages of Wikipedia?
Oui, ce qui est nécessaire.
I think I'm of the same mind, I'd rather keep pushing the typography improvements, rather than another split. Once we roll out the next major update to typography refresh we could ping Molly White to get her feedback specifically.
*Jared Zimmerman * \ Director of User Experience \ Wikimedia Foundation
M : +1 415 609 4043 | : @JaredZimmermanhttps://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman
On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 1:02 AM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 12:45 AM, Niklas Laxström < niklas.laxstrom@gmail.com> wrote:
When you say *all of Wikipedia* does it include all languages of Wikipedia?
Oui, ce qui est nécessaire.
-- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design