Hi Amir,
While I think that you are well-intentioned, you may be underestimating the effects of small changes that are done on a large scale. I believe that color changes to the UI are not urgent changes, and there is every reason to do widespread communication about proposed changes (*not* the week that changes are rolling out, but instead two to three months in advance), to provide opportunity for discussion, and to provide a buffer time period between the finalization of the decision and the execution of the change.
Perhaps an organizational change that would be helpful here is assigning a Community Liaison to the the WMF Design team to help that team with communications and rollout plans.
Also, perhaps it would help my project if I had a meeting with someone from the WMF Design team to get a better sense of what UI changes to expect over the next 24 months. I am working on help videos for Wikimedia content wikis, and I would like those videos to reflect the real-world environment to the extent possible. Is there a particular person on the Design team that you would recommend that I contact about setting up a meeting?
Thanks,
Pine
On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 12:53 AM, Amir Ladsgroup ladsgroup@gmail.com wrote:
Hey, If a community dislikes a change they can instantly override it using mediawiki:common.css. In that case, no one would forces them to change it back.
But these changes are too small to notice and even smaller to dislike. For example no one is trying to change blue to red, But we changed a certain shade of blue to another shade that you are more familiar with and seen in other places. That's why for small changes we never got negative feedback. We are doing this to give users better experience by using familiar colors. It's really hard to see any objections overall.
Best
On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 10:03 AM Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Amir,
Were these changes discussed in advance with Wikimedia communities on mailing lists, village pumps, etc? I am thinking particularly of template designers and maintainers, who may have coordinated their work with the previous color scheme. It seems to me that Wikimedians should be given plenty of notice that color changes like these are proposed, and should
be
given ample opportunity to comment on them before they are rolled out,
but
this is the first that I recall hearing of these changes. I would go so
far
as to say that there should be an RfC before making changes like this to community wikis.
Also, it seems to me that there should be a period of a few weeks between the commitment to make a change like this and the implementation of a change so that Wikimedians whose work is affected have an opportunity to prepare for changes.
I'm not going to push for a rollback of this change unless I hear a lot
of
community voices saying that this particular set of changes is a problem, but I would hope that changes like this would be communicated and
discussed
widely in the future and that an RfC would be undertaken before making these kinds of changes to community wikis.
Pine
On Thu, Dec 8, 2016 at 4:45 PM, Amir Ladsgroup ladsgroup@gmail.com wrote:
Hey, With the deployment of 1.29.0-wmf.5 which just finished on all wikis, several changes were made in user interface colors.
- Gray boxes (TOC, Wikitables, catlinks, thumbnails, elements in
history
etc.) has changed from #f9f9f9 as background to #f8f9fa and #aaa as
border
to #a2a9b1. [1] This change is almost not noticeable but in order to
keep
consistency between all elements of a wiki page, change such usages in
your
Mediawiki:Common.css (for example for infoboxes).
- Search results border and background colors also changed and this one
is
also not noticeable. [2]
- "You have new message in your talk page" notification color has
changed
from #f9c557 to #fc3 (yellow). [3] This change is noticeable.
These all are parts of works ongoing by WMF designers and engineers to
have
a standard UI [4] using standard colors picked from Wikimedia color palette. [5]
Using consistent colors helps users have better experience and
strengthen
branding. Also these colors have passed WCAG standard for accessibility (for color blind people). Lots have been done already. Such as content translation [6] wikipedia.org portal [7] [8], mobile frontend [9],
Echo
email notification [10], Deffered changes [11] ORES review tool [12], disambig icon [13] [14], WMF wiki main page [15] and a lot more.
So I recommend you to use the color palette [5] as much as possible.
I must explicitly note that I did a little and I don't think I can talk
on
behalf of UI-standardization team :)
[5]: Wikimedia color palette: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/M82 [6]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/321609 [7]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/322831 [8]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/325057 [9]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/317746 [10]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/323554 [11]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/323558 [12]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/320341 [13]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Disambig.svg [14]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Disambig_gray.svg [15]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home
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