It has always concerned me that all the Wikimedia wikis look the same. The main concern here is the majority of wiki's based on MediaWiki thus look associated. I remember 5 years ago I used to think that WikiTravel was a Wikimedia project because the branding was so similar.
I can imagine MediaWiki.org using the default skin would be of value for attracting new users by making this distinction but has there ever been talk about configuring a different skin (even slightly different - say something as simple as colour scheme) for Wikimedia projects?
Personally I'd love to see every project have it's own skin and own way of expressing itself. Am I alone here in this desire?
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 7:33 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
It has always concerned me that all the Wikimedia wikis look the same. The main concern here is the majority of wiki's based on MediaWiki thus look associated. I remember 5 years ago I used to think that WikiTravel was a Wikimedia project because the branding was so similar.
I can imagine MediaWiki.org using the default skin would be of value for attracting new users by making this distinction but has there ever been talk about configuring a different skin (even slightly different
- say something as simple as colour scheme) for Wikimedia projects?
Personally I'd love to see every project have it's own skin and own way of expressing itself. Am I alone here in this desire?
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
I feel like the best time to do that would have been when vector was being released. We could have easily kept the default MediaWiki skin as monobook, and had vector as the default for WMF wikis. Some people would want their wikis to look like Wikimedia's, but realistically most people setting up MediaWiki just go with the default.
--bawolff
On 2013-07-15 3:40 PM, bawolff wrote:
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 7:33 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
It has always concerned me that all the Wikimedia wikis look the same. The main concern here is the majority of wiki's based on MediaWiki thus look associated. I remember 5 years ago I used to think that WikiTravel was a Wikimedia project because the branding was so similar.
I can imagine MediaWiki.org using the default skin would be of value for attracting new users by making this distinction but has there ever been talk about configuring a different skin (even slightly different
- say something as simple as colour scheme) for Wikimedia projects?
Personally I'd love to see every project have it's own skin and own way of expressing itself. Am I alone here in this desire?
I feel like the best time to do that would have been when vector was being released. We could have easily kept the default MediaWiki skin as monobook, and had vector as the default for WMF wikis. Some people would want their wikis to look like Wikimedia's, but realistically most people setting up MediaWiki just go with the default.
--bawolff
Vector was part of a usability improvement project. It fixed a number of fundamental usability defects inside the MonoBook skin.
I don't really like the idea that we should have keep monobook around as the default anywhere.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]
On 15 July 2013 15:40, bawolff bawolff+wn@gmail.com wrote:
I feel like the best time to do that would have been when vector was being released. We could have easily kept the default MediaWiki skin as monobook, and had vector as the default for WMF wikis. Some people would want their wikis to look like Wikimedia's, but realistically most people setting up MediaWiki just go with the default.
That was explicitly mentioned as a goal when the UsabilityInitiative was kicked off, but the opportunity got lost along the way when Vector was added to the tarball as the default skin. However, I agree with Daniel that there are ethical issues about keeping back the improvements made just for look-and-feel differential - possibly this could be done with a different default colour scheme?
J.
On 07/16/2013 12:40 AM, bawolff wrote:
Some people would want their wikis to look like Wikimedia's, but realistically most people setting up MediaWiki just go with the default.
Most people would like a custom look&feel done with little effort (just look what people do when they got a Wordpress, leave alone a Twitter or Facebook account).
But realistically, look what those of us MediaWiki sysadmins find when trying to differentiate away from plain Vector:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Skinning/Vector http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CSS
Excited? Encouraged to touch anything? :)
Of course a shortcut is to just go for a different skin but then you enter an uncertain land: will all the functionality work? will it be maintained in the future? mobile?
Just too much hassle for changing some colors and styles. Yet I bet with a simple nice doc just touching the basics, a lot more Vector based MediaWiki diversity would be seen out there.
On 07/16/2013 07:08 AM, Quim Gil wrote:
Just too much hassle for changing some colors and styles.
You don't need to make a skin, or even a subskin, to change a few colors and styles on a single wiki. You can do that by editing MediaWiki:Vector.css (or MediaWiki:Common.css if it's for all skins). That's the point of those pages.
Matt Flaschen
On 2013-07-19 11:16 PM, Matthew Flaschen wrote:
On 07/16/2013 07:08 AM, Quim Gil wrote:
Just too much hassle for changing some colors and styles.
You don't need to make a skin, or even a subskin, to change a few colors and styles on a single wiki. You can do that by editing MediaWiki:Vector.css (or MediaWiki:Common.css if it's for all skins). That's the point of those pages.
Matt Flaschen
We might have to do something about how hard Vector makes that. To simply change the general color of Vector from blue to green you have to edit a bunch of images and upload your own version of each of them. And add a bunch of specific rules to the skin changing the background image of each.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 3:33 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
Personally I'd love to see every project have it's own skin and own way of expressing itself. Am I alone here in this desire?
If examples like http://nv.wikipedia.org/ and the various home pages of wikis are any evidence, I'd say you're not alone there.
I actually thing nv.wikipedia.org is a bad example.... I actually think all the Wikipedia's should have consistency. Clicking on a language link in Wikipedia to the Navajo language gives the impression you've left and gone to an external site.
When I say projects should have their own skins I mean projects excluding languages: e.g. mediawiki, meta wiki, wikipedia, wikibooks, wiktionary, wikivoyage etc etc
It does however point to a need for being able to customise tweaks out of the box. In Tumblr you can do things like change the font colour, heading colours etc. If we were to move to something like SASS or LESS compiled CSS ResourceLoader support it would be trivial to generate new themes with different colour schemes... which would be super cool. Common.css is not the place for these sorts of changes - it just leads to css cascade abuse.
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 3:41 PM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 3:33 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
Personally I'd love to see every project have it's own skin and own way of expressing itself. Am I alone here in this desire?
If examples like http://nv.wikipedia.org/ and the various home pages of wikis are any evidence, I'd say you're not alone there.
-- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
On 07/16/2013 08:20 PM, Jon Robson wrote:
It does however point to a need for being able to customise tweaks out of the box. In Tumblr you can do things like change the font colour, heading colours etc. If we were to move to something like SASS or LESS compiled CSS ResourceLoader support it would be trivial to generate new themes with different colour schemes... which would be super cool.
I know SASS and LESS are cool, but we don't need them for that. It's quite possible to dynamically generate simple CSS for things like heading colors. There's already some dynamic CSS for other purposes in core (e.g. underline preferences, link colors). An extension could do this too.
Common.css is not the place for these sorts of changes - it just leads to css cascade abuse.
Wiki administrators are still going to want this ultimate flexibility, but that doesn't mean it needs to be the only option.
Matt Flaschen