On mobile we continuously get bugs related to inline styles in templates. For example: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68001
When these happen we usually spend time investigating, discover it is because of a troublesome inline style in the template and then we communicate this on the template talk page [1]
However, rarely do these get replies and rarely does anything get fixed.
Am I doing something wrong? Should I be posting these problems elsewhere? It seems like a lot of templates do not have active maintainers.
There has been an RFC [2] open for ages that when solved I hope will lead to lots of discussions between developers and template maintainers but right now it seems even without the tools we are failing.
How can we get better at making our template styles more mobile friendly?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Quotation#Padding_interferes_wit... [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Allow_styling_in_templat...
(See also https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35704 for lots of examples of broken template/css combos)
On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 3:02 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
On mobile we continuously get bugs related to inline styles in templates. For example: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68001
When these happen we usually spend time investigating, discover it is because of a troublesome inline style in the template and then we communicate this on the template talk page [1]
However, rarely do these get replies and rarely does anything get fixed.
Am I doing something wrong? Should I be posting these problems elsewhere? It seems like a lot of templates do not have active maintainers.
There has been an RFC [2] open for ages that when solved I hope will lead to lots of discussions between developers and template maintainers but right now it seems even without the tools we are failing.
How can we get better at making our template styles more mobile friendly?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Quotation#Padding_interferes_wit... [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Allow_styling_in_templat...
One thing that would help tremendously would be encouraging template standardization on the wikis. For example, on en.wiki, we currently have 60 different quotation templates![1] And all of them have completely different inline styling (most of which don't work well on mobile). If there were only 10 quotation templates instead of 60 it would be a more manageable issue. One of these days I'll start an on-wiki RfC about this.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Quotation_templates
Ryan Kaldari
On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 3:02 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
On mobile we continuously get bugs related to inline styles in templates. For example: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68001
When these happen we usually spend time investigating, discover it is because of a troublesome inline style in the template and then we communicate this on the template talk page [1]
However, rarely do these get replies and rarely does anything get fixed.
Am I doing something wrong? Should I be posting these problems elsewhere? It seems like a lot of templates do not have active maintainers.
There has been an RFC [2] open for ages that when solved I hope will lead to lots of discussions between developers and template maintainers but right now it seems even without the tools we are failing.
How can we get better at making our template styles more mobile friendly?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Quotation#Padding_interferes_wit... [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Allow_styling_in_templat...
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Bináris wikiposta@gmail.com wrote:
Is there a techguide anywhere on how to style templates to avoid mobile problems?
I'll write up some notes...
The first thing is to *test your pages on mobile*. The least one can do is fire up a page in *.m.wikipedia.org in a desktop browser and make the window narrow. Or, use your smartphone's browser if you have one.
Often, things can be reworked to cleanly handle both wide and narrow windows; for instance: * using inline-block or floats instead of tables or fixed percentage widths to set things side-by-side
Sometimes it may be necessary to make the style more complex, using media queries to do separate styling for wide or narrow screens (google for "CSS media queries" to see how all this works). Currently there's no way to do media queries in inline style attributes, which makes things hard for templates.
If your template uses styles defined in MediaWiki:Common.css / MediaWiki:Mobile.css you can define separate style overrides there, but you have to be an admin to edit those etc so it's harder to deal with.
-- brion
On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Bináris wikiposta@gmail.com wrote:
Is there a techguide anywhere on how to style templates to avoid mobile problems?
There are a few notes here - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/Writing_a_MobileFrontend_frien... but these apply to code rather than templates.
Also find examples of bad practices in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Deprecating_inline_style...
On 7 October 2014 23:12, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
One thing that would help tremendously would be encouraging template standardization on the wikis. For example, on en.wiki, we currently have 60 different quotation templates![1] And all of them have completely different inline styling (most of which don't work well on mobile). If there were only 10 quotation templates instead of 60 it would be a more manageable issue.
In the recent past, I've done a *lot* of work on en.WP, encouraging the community to delete or merge redundant templates.
I'm happy to hepl with doing so for quote templates.
BTW, I've generally found that en.Wikipedia editors are unaware that we have a different appearance on mobile, much less are willing to take that into account when writing pages or making templates.
On 11 October 2014 20:12, Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:
In the recent past, I've done a *lot* of work on en.WP, encouraging the community to delete or merge redundant templates.
I'm happy to hepl with doing so for quote templates.
I've nominated a bunch of quote templates for deletion, at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2014_Oc...
You can see for yourselves how that's going.
On 7 October 2014 23:12, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
One thing that would help tremendously would be encouraging template standardization on the wikis. For example, on en.wiki, we currently have 60 different quotation templates![1]
Now down to 49, with several "Template for Deletion" discussions ongoing.
On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 3:02 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
On mobile we continuously get bugs related to inline styles in templates. For example: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68001
When these happen we usually spend time investigating, discover it is because of a troublesome inline style in the template and then we communicate this on the template talk page [1]
However, rarely do these get replies and rarely does anything get fixed.
Am I doing something wrong? Should I be posting these problems elsewhere? It seems like a lot of templates do not have active maintainers.
The wiki way is not to ask and wait for someone else to act, but to act directly in good faith and communicate what you did and why so that if there is disagreement it can be resolved afterwards.
Ultimately if we're unwilling to help edit and maintain the content and style of the wikis, we're going to be stuck working around bad styles forever.
There has been an RFC [2] open for ages that when solved I hope will lead to lots of discussions between developers and template maintainers but right now it seems even without the tools we are failing.
How can we get better at making our template styles more mobile friendly?
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Allow_styling_in_templat...
I'd like to revitalize this one; I'll do some testing this weekend and put it on the agenda for next week's RfC.
I'm also interested in some kind of easy "preview how this page will look on mobile" in the editor, which would probably be a separate thing...
-- brion
The wiki way is not to ask and wait for someone else to act, but to act directly in good faith and communicate what you did and why so that if there is disagreement it can be resolved afterwards.
Sadly I only have template edit rights on my staff account and I really don't like using that account. In addition to this there are hundreds of copies of the template I fix so this becomes a nightmare.
Templates aren't protected by default =).
If they are protected there is generally a good reason such as heavy usage, you can always put a comment on the talk page and tag it with {{EditProtected}} which will summon someone with sysop rights.
You can also setup a /Sandbox page with the proposed changes so the person that makes the changes can see the differences and make sure it works.
On 8 October 2014 10:48, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
The wiki way is not to ask and wait for someone else to act, but to act directly in good faith and communicate what you did and why so that if there is disagreement it can be resolved afterwards.
Sadly I only have template edit rights on my staff account and I really don't like using that account. In addition to this there are hundreds of copies of the template I fix so this becomes a nightmare.
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Jon,
Regarding editing specific templates, I'll echo Brion here. If a template is causing difficulties for your work and you feel like you know enough to fix it, then fix it! That's the wiki way. If you don't have the rights to edit the template (e.g. because it's protected), then speak to Tomasz and he will try to get you the rights that you need.
Regarding the broader issue of the fact that there are thousands of these kinds of templates, I will also echo Brion! We need to make mobile testing more visible to those who are creating those templates.
Dan
On 7 October 2014 15:14, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 3:02 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
On mobile we continuously get bugs related to inline styles in templates. For example: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68001
When these happen we usually spend time investigating, discover it is because of a troublesome inline style in the template and then we communicate this on the template talk page [1]
However, rarely do these get replies and rarely does anything get fixed.
Am I doing something wrong? Should I be posting these problems elsewhere? It seems like a lot of templates do not have active maintainers.
The wiki way is not to ask and wait for someone else to act, but to act directly in good faith and communicate what you did and why so that if there is disagreement it can be resolved afterwards.
Ultimately if we're unwilling to help edit and maintain the content and style of the wikis, we're going to be stuck working around bad styles forever.
There has been an RFC [2] open for ages that when solved I hope will lead to lots of discussions between developers and template maintainers but right now it seems even without the tools we are failing.
How can we get better at making our template styles more mobile friendly?
[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Allow_styling_in_templat...
I'd like to revitalize this one; I'll do some testing this weekend and put it on the agenda for next week's RfC.
I'm also interested in some kind of easy "preview how this page will look on mobile" in the editor, which would probably be a separate thing...
-- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 7 Oct 2014 18:03, "Dan Garry" dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
Jon,
Regarding editing specific templates, I'll echo Brion here. If a template is causing difficulties for your work and you feel like you know enough to fix it, then fix it! That's the wiki way. If you don't have the rights to edit the template (e.g. because it's protected), then speak to Tomasz and he will try to get you the rights that you need.
Sure but this isn't scalable. I need more people caring about this stuff other than me :)
Also currently the only way to deal with these issues is to move styles into Common.CSS which only really makes sense for widely used templates... Ideally I'd want some kind of sanity checking rather than doing it live which seems to be the current status quo. Changing HTML /CSS/JavaScript always felt uncomfortable to me.
Regarding the broader issue of the fact that there are thousands of these kinds of templates, I will also echo Brion! We need to make mobile testing more visible to those who are creating those templates.
Dan
On 7 October 2014 15:14, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 3:02 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org
wrote:
On mobile we continuously get bugs related to inline styles in templates. For example: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68001
When these happen we usually spend time investigating, discover it is because of a troublesome inline style in the template and then we communicate this on the template talk page [1]
However, rarely do these get replies and rarely does anything get
fixed.
Am I doing something wrong? Should I be posting these problems elsewhere? It seems like a lot of templates do not have active maintainers.
The wiki way is not to ask and wait for someone else to act, but to act directly in good faith and communicate what you did and why so that if there is disagreement it can be resolved afterwards.
Ultimately if we're unwilling to help edit and maintain the content and style of the wikis, we're going to be stuck working around bad styles forever.
There has been an RFC [2] open for ages that when solved I hope will lead to lots of discussions between developers and template maintainers but right now it seems even without the tools we are failing.
How can we get better at making our template styles more mobile
friendly?
[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Allow_styling_in_templat...
I'd like to revitalize this one; I'll do some testing this weekend and
put
it on the agenda for next week's RfC.
I'm also interested in some kind of easy "preview how this page will
look
on mobile" in the editor, which would probably be a separate thing...
-- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
-- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 7 Oct 2014 18:15, "Jon Robson" jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 7 Oct 2014 18:03, "Dan Garry" dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
Jon,
Regarding editing specific templates, I'll echo Brion here. If a
template
is causing difficulties for your work and you feel like you know enough
to
fix it, then fix it! That's the wiki way. If you don't have the rights
to
edit the template (e.g. because it's protected), then speak to Tomasz
and
he will try to get you the rights that you need.
Sure but this isn't scalable. I need more people caring about this stuff
other than me :)
Also currently the only way to deal with these issues is to move styles
into Common.CSS which only really makes sense for widely used templates... Ideally I'd want some kind of sanity checking rather than doing it live which seems to be the current status quo. Changing HTML /CSS/JavaScript [without any kind of review] always felt uncomfortable to me.
Regarding the broader issue of the fact that there are thousands of
these
kinds of templates, I will also echo Brion! We need to make mobile
testing
more visible to those who are creating those templates.
Dan
On 7 October 2014 15:14, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 3:02 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org
wrote:
On mobile we continuously get bugs related to inline styles in templates. For example: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68001
When these happen we usually spend time investigating, discover it
is
because of a troublesome inline style in the template and then we communicate this on the template talk page [1]
However, rarely do these get replies and rarely does anything get
fixed.
Am I doing something wrong? Should I be posting these problems elsewhere? It seems like a lot of templates do not have active maintainers.
The wiki way is not to ask and wait for someone else to act, but to
act
directly in good faith and communicate what you did and why so that if there is disagreement it can be resolved afterwards.
Ultimately if we're unwilling to help edit and maintain the content
and
style of the wikis, we're going to be stuck working around bad styles forever.
There has been an RFC [2] open for ages that when solved I hope will lead to lots of discussions between developers and template maintainers but right now it seems even without the tools we are failing.
How can we get better at making our template styles more mobile
friendly?
[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Allow_styling_in_templat...
I'd like to revitalize this one; I'll do some testing this weekend
and put
it on the agenda for next week's RfC.
I'm also interested in some kind of easy "preview how this page will
look
on mobile" in the editor, which would probably be a separate thing...
-- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
-- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Jon,
1: Get templateeditor rights on your volunteer account, you can edit the majority of templates with that, and you only need to proof your skill with templates for that, which is a reasonably low barrier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_editor 2: This whole stuff is mostly as far as it is going to get on en.wp without https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Allow_styling_in_templat... What remains currently, even when consolidated and cleaned up, will still be thousands of lines of CSS, for what will only touch 1 % of the pages, so it has no business in Common.css, yet much of it requires media queries to really make a worthwhile improvement. 3: Whoever mentioned blockquotes… Just before I burned out on en.wp, I was working on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Quotation_cleanup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Quotation_cleanup
There is indeed a lot of work to do there, they are a mess.
DJ
On 8 okt. 2014, at 03:16, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
On 7 Oct 2014 18:15, "Jon Robson" jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 7 Oct 2014 18:03, "Dan Garry" dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
Jon,
Regarding editing specific templates, I'll echo Brion here. If a
template
is causing difficulties for your work and you feel like you know enough
to
fix it, then fix it! That's the wiki way. If you don't have the rights
to
edit the template (e.g. because it's protected), then speak to Tomasz
and
he will try to get you the rights that you need.
Sure but this isn't scalable. I need more people caring about this stuff
other than me :)
Also currently the only way to deal with these issues is to move styles
into Common.CSS which only really makes sense for widely used templates... Ideally I'd want some kind of sanity checking rather than doing it live which seems to be the current status quo. Changing HTML /CSS/JavaScript [without any kind of review] always felt uncomfortable to me.
Regarding the broader issue of the fact that there are thousands of
these
kinds of templates, I will also echo Brion! We need to make mobile
testing
more visible to those who are creating those templates.
Dan
On 7 October 2014 15:14, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 3:02 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org
wrote:
On mobile we continuously get bugs related to inline styles in templates. For example: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68001
When these happen we usually spend time investigating, discover it
is
because of a troublesome inline style in the template and then we communicate this on the template talk page [1]
However, rarely do these get replies and rarely does anything get
fixed.
Am I doing something wrong? Should I be posting these problems elsewhere? It seems like a lot of templates do not have active maintainers.
The wiki way is not to ask and wait for someone else to act, but to
act
directly in good faith and communicate what you did and why so that if there is disagreement it can be resolved afterwards.
Ultimately if we're unwilling to help edit and maintain the content
and
style of the wikis, we're going to be stuck working around bad styles forever.
There has been an RFC [2] open for ages that when solved I hope will lead to lots of discussions between developers and template maintainers but right now it seems even without the tools we are failing.
How can we get better at making our template styles more mobile
friendly?
[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Allow_styling_in_templat...
I'd like to revitalize this one; I'll do some testing this weekend
and put
it on the agenda for next week's RfC.
I'm also interested in some kind of easy "preview how this page will
look
on mobile" in the editor, which would probably be a separate thing...
-- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
-- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Oct 7, 2014 10:03 PM, "Dan Garry" dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
Jon,
Regarding editing specific templates, I'll echo Brion here. If a template is causing difficulties for your work and you feel like you know enough to fix it, then fix it! That's the wiki way. If you don't have the rights to edit the template (e.g. because it's protected), then speak to Tomasz and he will try to get you the rights that you need.
Umm, is that really a good idea? Protected templates are protected for a reason usually (at least on projects that ive worked on. Can't speak for enwiki). {{Editprotected}} seems like a better option for those, even if simply for political reasons, and if you find yourself making a lot of such requests why not ask the community how it feels about giving out advanced rights.
Imho, wmf granted advanced rights should be reserved for more serious issues than purely asethetic ones.
I agree with the setiment of just being bold for unprotected templates.
--bawolff
As members of the Mobile Team, it's our job to make the mobile platform the best it can be. If we have to edit templates to do that because they're causing significant display issues that are disrupting the platform, so be it. For example, let's say pie charts are completely broken on mobile and display incorrectly. Should we not fix it because it's "only aesthetic"?
Jon is very capable and his restraint in this matter demonstrates that. I trust him, like I would trust any administrator, to know when directly editing is appropriate (e.g. templates protected simply to fend off vandalism), and when making an edit request is more appropriate (e.g. particularly complex templates which need review of changes).
Dan
On Tuesday, October 7, 2014, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
On Oct 7, 2014 10:03 PM, "Dan Garry" <dgarry@wikimedia.org javascript:;> wrote:
Jon,
Regarding editing specific templates, I'll echo Brion here. If a template is causing difficulties for your work and you feel like you know enough
to
fix it, then fix it! That's the wiki way. If you don't have the rights to edit the template (e.g. because it's protected), then speak to Tomasz and he will try to get you the rights that you need.
Umm, is that really a good idea? Protected templates are protected for a reason usually (at least on projects that ive worked on. Can't speak for enwiki). {{Editprotected}} seems like a better option for those, even if simply for political reasons, and if you find yourself making a lot of such requests why not ask the community how it feels about giving out advanced rights.
Imho, wmf granted advanced rights should be reserved for more serious issues than purely asethetic ones.
I agree with the setiment of just being bold for unprotected templates.
--bawolff _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 8 okt. 2014, at 04:37, Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
As members of the Mobile Team, it's our job to make the mobile platform the best it can be. If we have to edit templates to do that because they're causing significant display issues that are disrupting the platform, so be it. For example, let's say pie charts are completely broken on mobile and display incorrectly. Should we not fix it because it's "only aesthetic”?
Well… I would say you should fix it.. but editing the wiki is not like editing the source code of MediaWiki. There are conventions and methodologies in templates can be quite unfamiliar or unknown to developers. In the past, staff has made a couple mistakes here, so people tend to keep an eye on it.
If the community can trust you to not make mistakes, they generally accept any edit. Learn and build trust by: 1: Discuss problems on the talkpage. (You can leave a ‘please look at this talkpage’ note on VP/T). 2: Use the sandbox to illustrate your discussion when that makes sense. 3: If there is positive agreement or no response, yet you feel confident, then make the edit. Or make the editrequest. 4: Keep checking in for a few days to verify if there has been any fallout. Don’t disappear, if you are making edits to the wiki, you are part of the wiki. 5: Remember that you need to do this for EACH AND EVERY individual wiki…
DJ
Jon is very capable and his restraint in this matter demonstrates that. I trust him, like I would trust any administrator, to know when directly editing is appropriate (e.g. templates protected simply to fend off vandalism), and when making an edit request is more appropriate (e.g. particularly complex templates which need review of changes).
Dan
On Tuesday, October 7, 2014, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
On Oct 7, 2014 10:03 PM, "Dan Garry" <dgarry@wikimedia.org javascript:;> wrote:
Jon,
Regarding editing specific templates, I'll echo Brion here. If a template is causing difficulties for your work and you feel like you know enough
to
fix it, then fix it! That's the wiki way. If you don't have the rights to edit the template (e.g. because it's protected), then speak to Tomasz and he will try to get you the rights that you need.
Umm, is that really a good idea? Protected templates are protected for a reason usually (at least on projects that ive worked on. Can't speak for enwiki). {{Editprotected}} seems like a better option for those, even if simply for political reasons, and if you find yourself making a lot of such requests why not ask the community how it feels about giving out advanced rights.
Imho, wmf granted advanced rights should be reserved for more serious issues than purely asethetic ones.
I agree with the setiment of just being bold for unprotected templates.
--bawolff _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
-- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 4:00 AM, Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hartman+wmf_ml@gmail.com wrote:
5: Remember that you need to do this for EACH AND EVERY individual wiki…
...or, from what I have seen, if you do it only on enwiki then users will just create another fork of the template on smaller wikis and: * keep using the OLD and BROKEN template whenever they can (easy for them) * use the NEW and FIXED template only on pages which are translated from enwiki (easy again... people are lazy) This is why we have proposals like https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GlobalTemplates https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global-Wiki
Helder
Helder wrote:
This is why we have proposals like https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GlobalTemplates https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global-Wiki
Yes, a million times this. We must figure out a way to centralize templates so that maintenance is easier. The current system of per-project wiki templates really strains under scale as many wikis have few active editors and most of them are not technical.
Regarding inline styling specifically, I feel like we had this exact conversation a year ago on Bugzilla or wikitech-l. As I recall, the gist of the previous discussion was that we need to better educate users about what good practice is, perhaps provide testing better tools (make it easier to see how it looks on mobile, as Brion suggests), and then slowly try to deprecate inline styling over the next few years.
I'm curious to see where the "Allow styling in templates" request for comments goes (cf. https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?curid=130320), particularly with regard to the goal of atomizing content, which I think the Parsoid and VisualEditor (Editing!) teams seem to want. While I probably generally agree with trying to kill inline styling, it does have seem to have a convenient advantage of being more easily encapsulated.
Related: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35704
MZMcBride
Perhaps someone could trail making a gadget that will display the template loaded into the m.* mobile experience so its's easier for users to have a look as a starting point?
On 9 October 2014 14:09, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Helder wrote:
This is why we have proposals like https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GlobalTemplates https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global-Wiki
Yes, a million times this. We must figure out a way to centralize templates so that maintenance is easier. The current system of per-project wiki templates really strains under scale as many wikis have few active editors and most of them are not technical.
Regarding inline styling specifically, I feel like we had this exact conversation a year ago on Bugzilla or wikitech-l. As I recall, the gist of the previous discussion was that we need to better educate users about what good practice is, perhaps provide testing better tools (make it easier to see how it looks on mobile, as Brion suggests), and then slowly try to deprecate inline styling over the next few years.
I'm curious to see where the "Allow styling in templates" request for comments goes (cf. https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?curid=130320), particularly with regard to the goal of atomizing content, which I think the Parsoid and VisualEditor (Editing!) teams seem to want. While I probably generally agree with trying to kill inline styling, it does have seem to have a convenient advantage of being more easily encapsulated.
Related: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35704
MZMcBride
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Oct 9, 2014 8:08 AM, "MZMcBride" z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Helder wrote:
This is why we have proposals like https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GlobalTemplates https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global-Wiki
Yes, a million times this. We must figure out a way to centralize templates so that maintenance is easier. The current system of per-project wiki templates really strains under scale as many wikis have few active editors and most of them are not technical.
Regarding inline styling specifically, I feel like we had this exact conversation a year ago on Bugzilla or wikitech-l. As I recall, the gist of the previous discussion was that we need to better educate users about what good practice is, perhaps provide testing better tools (make it easier to see how it looks on mobile, as Brion suggests), and then slowly try to deprecate inline styling over the next few years.
I'm curious to see where the "Allow styling in templates" request for comments goes (cf. https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?curid=130320), particularly with regard to the goal of atomizing content, which I think the Parsoid and VisualEditor (Editing!) teams seem to want. While I probably generally agree with trying to kill inline styling, it does have seem to have a convenient advantage of being more easily encapsulated.
Related: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35704
MZMcBride
If everything here comes together, centralizing templates may be not such a hot idea. The reason being, if we externalise style as the rfc proposes, and externalize logic in Lua modules, a large part of what is left is localization, which logically belongs on the local wiki - if we find a good way to centralize style and modules obviously.
I realize that it's not everything that's left, there is also the markup structure obviously, which is often a large part of a template, or sometimes even all of the template, and splitting style off to a central wiki while keeping the templates to which the style applies local seems off as well. It is something to maybe keep in mind though, and give some further thought.
I'd like to note that I'm really happy with this thread by the way. Jon fixing the mess we leave behind on our on wiki template work obviously doesn't scale. But Jon and others in development taking the lead through some edits, so people become more aware of that mobile is, actually, a thing, and how to deal with that with regard to styling could work.
--Martijn.
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On Oct 7, 2014 10:03 PM, "Dan Garry" dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
Jon,
Regarding editing specific templates, I'll echo Brion here. If a template is causing difficulties for your work and you feel like you know enough to fix it, then fix it! That's the wiki way. If you don't have the rights to edit the template (e.g. because it's protected), then speak to Tomasz and he will try to get you the rights that you need.
Umm, is that really a good idea? Protected templates are protected for a reason usually (at least on projects that ive worked on. Can't speak for enwiki). {{Editprotected}} seems like a better option for those, even if simply for political reasons, and if you find yourself making a lot of such requests why not ask the community how it feels about giving out advanced rights.
Imho, wmf granted advanced rights should be reserved for more serious issues than purely asethetic ones.
I agree with the setiment of just being bold for unprotected templates.
--bawolff
Hello,
I'm also interested in some kind of easy "preview how this page will look on mobile" in the editor, which would probably be a separate thing...
I took the liberty to take this idea and created a sample change for MobileFrontend: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/166089/
With this patch you would be able to click "Mobile preview" right next to the "Show preview" button. In a new tab you will see the parsed content of your edit in the mobile skin.
I like the whole idea of a mobile preview for desktop editors, so maybe, we can reach this in any way :)
Freundliche Grüße / Kind regards Florian
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: wikitech-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] Im Auftrag von Brion Vibber Gesendet: Mittwoch, 8. Oktober 2014 00:14 An: Wikimedia developers Betreff: Re: [Wikitech-l] {{TemplatesThatWorkOnMobile}}
On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 3:02 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
On mobile we continuously get bugs related to inline styles in templates. For example: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68001
When these happen we usually spend time investigating, discover it is because of a troublesome inline style in the template and then we communicate this on the template talk page [1]
However, rarely do these get replies and rarely does anything get fixed.
Am I doing something wrong? Should I be posting these problems elsewhere? It seems like a lot of templates do not have active maintainers.
The wiki way is not to ask and wait for someone else to act, but to act directly in good faith and communicate what you did and why so that if there is disagreement it can be resolved afterwards.
Ultimately if we're unwilling to help edit and maintain the content and style of the wikis, we're going to be stuck working around bad styles forever.
There has been an RFC [2] open for ages that when solved I hope will lead to lots of discussions between developers and template maintainers but right now it seems even without the tools we are failing.
How can we get better at making our template styles more mobile friendly?
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Allow_styling_in_t emplates
I'd like to revitalize this one; I'll do some testing this weekend and put it on the agenda for next week's RfC.
I'm also interested in some kind of easy "preview how this page will look on mobile" in the editor, which would probably be a separate thing...
-- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 07/10/14 22:02, Jon Robson wrote:
On mobile we continuously get bugs related to inline styles in templates. For example: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68001
When these happen we usually spend time investigating, discover it is because of a troublesome inline style in the template and then we communicate this on the template talk page [1]
However, rarely do these get replies and rarely does anything get fixed.
Am I doing something wrong? Should I be posting these problems elsewhere? It seems like a lot of templates do not have active maintainers.
There has been an RFC [2] open for ages that when solved I hope will lead to lots of discussions between developers and template maintainers but right now it seems even without the tools we are failing.
How can we get better at making our template styles more mobile friendly?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Quotation#Padding_interferes_wit... [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Allow_styling_in_templat...
In a lot of cases, it's likely nobody's actively watching the page, or necessarily has the skill to actually enact the change. Normally for these things the best bet is to either change it yourself if you have the rights, or put in an edit request.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_requests for the long-winded explanation on enwp, but basically it boils down to slapping {{request edit}} on the talkpage with an explanation. That way people actually see the request.
-I
On 07/10/14 22:17, Isarra Yos wrote:
On 07/10/14 22:02, Jon Robson wrote:
On mobile we continuously get bugs related to inline styles in templates. For example: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68001
When these happen we usually spend time investigating, discover it is because of a troublesome inline style in the template and then we communicate this on the template talk page [1]
However, rarely do these get replies and rarely does anything get fixed.
Am I doing something wrong? Should I be posting these problems elsewhere? It seems like a lot of templates do not have active maintainers.
There has been an RFC [2] open for ages that when solved I hope will lead to lots of discussions between developers and template maintainers but right now it seems even without the tools we are failing.
How can we get better at making our template styles more mobile friendly?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Quotation#Padding_interferes_wit... [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Allow_styling_in_templat...
In a lot of cases, it's likely nobody's actively watching the page, or necessarily has the skill to actually enact the change. Normally for these things the best bet is to either change it yourself if you have the rights, or put in an edit request.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_requests for the long-winded explanation on enwp, but basically it boils down to slapping {{request edit}} on the talkpage with an explanation. That way people actually see the request.
-I
Er, that should have probably been {{edit protected}}, not request edit, sorry.
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