Timeless: a grant proposal - Wikimedia-l

29 Mar 2017

Hi,

I'm Isarra, a volunteer MediaWiki developer, and I've submitted a grant 
proposal to the WMF to support my work on a new responsive skin designed 
for the Wikimedia projects, Timeless:

* Abstract: A new skin, Timeless, has been deployed to the Beta Cluster, 
but to make it worth eventual deployment to all projects, we need proper 
research into what's expected/needed from a better skin, and the ability 
to devote development resources to making it meet these 
expectations/needs. This grant, as part of a larger series of vaguely 
planned grants intended to work on many of the underlying issues with 
MediaWiki's user-facing interfaces, will serve to address this need.
* https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Timeless

Timeless currently exists as fairly basic prototype, but I invite you to 
take a look at the current version:

* Wiki specifically for Timeless: 
https://timeless-skin.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page
* To see what it might look/act like in production, there is a copy of 
the Simple English Wikipedia on the Beta Cluster, where Timeless has 
already been deployed: 
https://simple.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page - you can 
create an account, set your skin to Timeless, and go through some of the 
things you might do here, or simply append the string ?useskin=timeless 
to the end of any page url to see what it would look like in Timeless
* Skin documentation: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Timeless

If this looks like a project you would be interested in seeing happen, I 
would very much appreciate your feedback. This applies especially if you 
have any specific concerns about the skin or the proposal itself, or 
have faced particular problems on your own projects that you think this 
might be able to address, because the more of these are documented, the 
better they will be.

I look forward to working with all of you to redefine how we handle our 
project interfaces.

Thanks,

Isarra