On 2015-07-28, at 10:32 PM, Monte Hurd wrote:
Hey all!
I'm not very familiar with mediawiki skins, so apologies if this is ridiculous, not possible, mentioned already, etc, but what Jonathan said here really stood out to me as maybe at the heart of the issue:
"But a new default skin isn't just reader-facing; it's everyone-facing. Making things easier, more engaging, or more delightful for non-editors isn't going to do us much good if it makes things harder, less engaging, or less delightful for editors."My question is, could mediawiki use one skin when editing (Vector, or rename it "Vector-Editing") and a copy of Vector ("Vector-Reading" or something) when not editing (i.e. when reading)? They'd be initially identical, but going forward they could begin to slowly diverge as required by their respective editing and reading flows. There'd just have to be a mechanism to switch at the appropriate time... in theory.
-Monte
No, that's a bad idea. Editing is the core feature of Wikipedia. The interface when not editing should *scream* editability. Disentangle reading from editing, and we risk exacerbating the existing problem of recruiting newbies: it would make it harder for them to acclimatize if there's a big interface shift on top of everything else they have to learn (citing, neutrality, you name it). For example, VisualEditor is an effort to reduce the existing shift, by (largely) removing wikitext from the list of things necessary to learn.
Nihiltres