[Gendergap] Hardcore images essay - HELP!

[Andreas Kolbe]

--- On Thu, 17/2/11, Daniel and Elizabeth Case <dancase at frontiernet.net> wrote:

> From: Daniel and Elizabeth Case <dancase at frontiernet.net>

> And it is not just men who inadvertently create
> environments that project 
> this kind of filtration, informally filtering based on
> gender. "Girlzones" 
> can be created as well due to gender imbalance.


This an interesting line of thought. If you look at our interface, does it
look like it was designed by a man or a woman? Basically, we have the 
traditional IBM colour scheme: white, grey and blue, and lots of straight
lines and boxes. There is little red, green, pink or yellow, nothing curvy. 
Everything is very functional. There is no place to socialise (WP:Café?).

Apple were successful, and attracted women customers, because they broke 
with that design language.

Browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome allow you to customise the colour
appearance of your browser window, and lots of people produce colourful 
designs that they make available online for people to use. We offer 
various skins that users can set up in their preferences, but first of all
they are hard to find, they are only available after you've registered, and
having looked at them, they are all much of a muchness. 

Offering designers the possibility to design "looks" for Wikipedia, which
people can then download and use in their Wikipedia set-up, might be a
way to offer users the ability to give Wikipedia windows a look they can
identify with. It would also create a secondary community of designers,
just as there is for browsers, creating its own momentum in the blogosphere.

In addition, the default look for unregistered users could be varied
from time to time; or buttons provided for unregistered users that allow 
them to select a different look just by clicking a button.

Andreas