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