Isarra Yos wrote:
It should perhaps be noted that this seems a continuation on a general trend to avoid learning how to work with the communities and existing designs. It may be faster and less frustrating to simply sod off and do something new somewhere else, but this does not solve the existing problems - all it does is introduce more inconsistencies and more things that need to be consolidated later, if they survive at all. Except they usually don't, because ignoring what people do and use and expect does not lead to practical designs, it leads to things people don't use, maintain, or contribute to, which brings us back in part to the technical debt associated with having so many different wikis.
But when it comes to working with what already exists, I know from experience that this is far from easy, and in fact often incredibly frustrating in practice. Thing is, though, we have to - the existing products need to be worked with in order to move forward. That's just how it is.
As we tend to say about the unsolicited redesigns of (en) wikipedia, it's always a lot easier when you don't have to design with reality as a constraint. There's a reason we never use any of them.
Yes to all of this.
Quim Gil wrote:
Vector is the skin powering Wikipedia and hundreds of Wikimedia sites (and more), and for this reason changing anything there takes a lot of effort discussing and implementing (see Winter, and see several other projects that took so much time and brought so little changes to our users). We don't have design resources for this project, but we don't want to renounce to bring a fresh look to it. We are recycling a skin that already existed, we are filing bugs, and then Prateek, S, and maybe others contribute whenever they have time, motivated by their willingness to see that fresh look arriving to users.
You're kind of defeating your own argument here. You start by saying you have no design resources, then continue on by listing the people who are contributing time and code (which I'd call resources).
Meanwhile Vector is, in fact, in desperate need of design love. Creating a separate wiki and skin is adding to our technical debt, instead of really moving us forward by working on the skin that's seen by hundreds of millions of people. That was my takeaway from Isarra's post.
MZMcBride