[Foundation-l] Design for wikipedia's front page (and corporate)

[arnomane at gmx.de]

Am Freitag, 19. Mai 2006 04:25 schrieb Elisabeth Bauer:
> If you're a good designer, creating a
> good layout for wikipedia - do you really want any design ignorant admin
> later fiddling with it and maybe destroying it?

Well there is a problem: What is destruction? I am very sure that some people 
consider some of our CSS hacks in MediaWiki:Monobook.css destruction of the 
given Monobook design.

There are even some hacks that do alter on purpose polished layout in order to 
improve usability (for example a checker background for images in Wikimedia 
Commons in order to see transparency directly, see for example: 
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikipedia-logo.png).

Destruction is what a broad majority considers destruction and this can differ 
from community to community (For example I really dislike most of the 
namespace colors used in various Wikipedias but that's probably my personal 
taste only...).

But as you have pointed it out usability is important and so I think we can 
find a good commons sense for some kind of "corporate design" with only minor 
local tweaks if we favour usability over fancy design.

> If we want to have a professional designer creating a layout for us, we
> need to guarantee them that their work remains intact. My idea was,
> though, to use free licenses but have some kind of social contract that
> they will be consulted if any changes to the layout have to be done.

Well there is the requirement that you have to credit the author(s). In case 
someone else did modify a design you can force people by license (let us say 
GFDL) to say that this is a modified design so that the original author does 
not get blamed because some local ignorant admin did enforce his personal 
taste (although my own experience says that only in small communities you can 
act as dictator, in larger communities you need very good points so that 
other admins don't revert you).

So if a majority of a community is dumb and likes a stupid change, well I'd 
say they don't deserve anything better... And even in that case the original 
author has nothing to do with it.

So I am sure there will be projects that will destroy any given design that 
makes sense but these projects have to live with the problem that they are 
very probably not professional and thus probably not relevant. And a project 
that is irrelevant won't be noticed or just ignored over time (and if people 
from that project notice this loose of interest they will hopefully consider 
it and change their current style)...

Greetings, Arnomane