[Wikipedia-l] A slightly 'out there' suggestion for colour use

Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia-l at math.ucr.edu
Tue Aug 6 01:48:38 UTC 2002


Kajikit wrote in part:

>In paper encyclopedias they often use colour to help distinguish
>sections, and I know that the new tables are going to use colour as a
>feature, and the user pages have a pale coloured background to
>differentiate them from the main articles. Why not make an option to put
>a coloured header, or a coloured border, or a pale coloured background
>onto the Fictional pages to help identify them? When you hit the random
>button and landed up on a fictional page you'd see instantly by the pale
>pink (or whatever colour was decided) background.

Colour is pretty, but we should never let it encode information.
Many people won't be able to see our colours
(and I don't just mean colour blind people,
a problem that we could avoid with judicious selection).
I don't oppose this idea as such, but I think that the vital task,
and the only ultimate solution to this problem,
is to check each article to make sure that the text gives it away.
If the text doesn't say, then anything else is just a stopgap.


-- Toby Bartels
   <toby+wikipedia-l at math.ucr.edu>



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