--- On Thu, 17/2/11, Daniel and Elizabeth Case dancase@frontiernet.net wrote:
From: Daniel and Elizabeth Case dancase@frontiernet.net
And it is not just men who inadvertently create environments that project this kind of filtration, informally filtering based on gender. "Girlzones" can be created as well due to gender imbalance.
This an interesting line of thought. If you look at our interface, does it look like it was designed by a man or a woman? Basically, we have the traditional IBM colour scheme: white, grey and blue, and lots of straight lines and boxes. There is little red, green, pink or yellow, nothing curvy. Everything is very functional. There is no place to socialise (WP:Café?).
Apple were successful, and attracted women customers, because they broke with that design language.
Browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome allow you to customise the colour appearance of your browser window, and lots of people produce colourful designs that they make available online for people to use. We offer various skins that users can set up in their preferences, but first of all they are hard to find, they are only available after you've registered, and having looked at them, they are all much of a muchness.
Offering designers the possibility to design "looks" for Wikipedia, which people can then download and use in their Wikipedia set-up, might be a way to offer users the ability to give Wikipedia windows a look they can identify with. It would also create a secondary community of designers, just as there is for browsers, creating its own momentum in the blogosphere.
In addition, the default look for unregistered users could be varied from time to time; or buttons provided for unregistered users that allow them to select a different look just by clicking a button.
Andreas