Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[John Erling Blad]

For those interested: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-device-adapt-1/

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 10:47 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> Could we please update them with a slightly more up-to-date skin?
>
> Take a look at our Norwegian competitor in the lexicon field.
> https://snl.no/kunstig_intelligens
>
> John Erling Blad
> /jeblad

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[John Erling Blad]

I get a little scared when I read “probably, but not necessarily,
mostly by staff” because all kind of central standardization creates a
whole lot of arguing in the individual subprojects. If that
standardization means changing a whole lot of templates I'm afraid it
will create much more fighting than real solutions. I'm a little
“Marvin” here…

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 10:14 AM Amir E. Aharoni
 wrote:
>
> ‫בתאריך יום ה׳, 12 בדצמ׳ 2019 ב-23:37 מאת ‪Pine W‬‏ <‪wiki.p...@gmail.com
> ‬‏>:‬
>
> > I'm thinking out loud here. Are there any estimates of would be required in
> > terms of time (both staff time and community time) and money to make
> > templates and other tools be much easier to globalize across wikis and
> > across skins? I'm looking for an answer that is more specific than "a lot",
> > but isn't a promise or a detailed estimate.
> >
>
> Difficult to say.
>
> I won't make an actual time estimation, because I'm very bad at doing it,
> and because I have too many conflicts of interest ;)
>
> However, I do hope to give you something more specific than "a lot". I
> envision the following feasible plan for "global modules and templates,
> phase 1":
> * Make a localization framework for modules. (
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238417 ; probably, but not necessarily,
> mostly by staff)
> * Develop a documentation page and a framework for making robust modules (
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238532 ; probably, but not necessarily,
> mostly by staff).
> * Make modules storable and loadable from a global repository, and
> *actually enable it on all Wikimedia projects* (
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T41610 ; probably, but not necessarily,
> mostly by staff).
> * Migrate most local modules from all the wikis to using global modules,
> and deleting all the migrated local modules. This will have to be done by
> the editors communities in many wikis, and it will only be feasible if all
> the points above are planned and executed well. The challenges I expect at
> this step are:
> ** Making sure that just the right amount of things are global and
> everything that communities want to override locally can be conveniently
> overridden.
> ** Making tough choices about which modules to use when several communities
> developed modules with similar functionality. For example: English, French,
> Russian, Spanish, and Hebrew Wikipedias have modules for loading Wikidata
> values. They aren't the same, but they probably should be. Merging them
> into a global module will require a lot of good-faith collaboration.
>
> Note that I only mentioned modules. Templates have some extra challenges.
> But once modules are done well, a "phase 2" of this project, that would
> tackle templates, will become possible. Also, global gadgets will have to
> be a separate project. Maybe the same localization framework can be used
> for both modules and gadgets, but I cannot think of anything else that they
> really have in common.
>
> All of the above is my interpretation of discussions in the recent Tech
> Conf in Atlanta (other people may have a significantly different
> interpretation). See these Phab tasks, and the web of other tasks linked to
> them:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234661
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T52329
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[John Erling Blad]

A skin does not have to change the content, most of the skin is chrome
and can be changed without touching the content at all.

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 1:12 AM Nick Wilson (Quiddity)
 wrote:
>
> Multiple responses:
>
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 10:07 AM Juergen Fenn  wrote:
>
> > Am 12.12.19 um 02:25 Uhr schrieb Strainu:
> > > There is also a
> > > question of opportunity: with less and less desktop users, it just
> > > makes more sense to invest in the mobile experience
> >
> > Most authors still use desktop computers for writing articles or doing
> > maintenance work. Mobile is for readers.
> >
>
> That is true in most wikis, but not all, and it's a slowly growing
> percentage. Some contributors only have a phone as their single (or
> sometimes even just *shared*) access to the internet. Much of the world
> cannot afford a laptop/desktop computer. There are edit-percentage
> statistics in this spreadsheet in columns P and K:
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a-UBqsYtJl6gpauJyanx0nyxuPqRvhzJRN817XpkuS8/edit#gid=1610967999
> Secondly, we always need/hope to find new editors in all the projects, and
> if the readers are getting to our projects via mobile, then that could be
> the best place to get them started on the path to being an editor
> (occasional or regular). Getting readers to take that first step of an
> initial edit, can be the hardest part.
> Lastly, there's a useful essay by this Ewiki admin about mobile editing.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cullen328/Smartphone_editing
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 11:21 PM Amir E. Aharoni <
> amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
>
> > The tragic thing here is that reading is increasingly done on mobile
> > devices, and in some countries it's already the majority of pageviews. But
> > editing is mostly done on the desktop, which looks completely differently.
> > So editors don't even see a preview of how what they write will look for
> > *most* readers.
>
>
> Agreed.
> There is an old gadget on Enwiki (and re-used at a dozen other wikis, per
> [[m:Gadgets]]) which shows a mockup of how the article might appear on a
> small screen. I suspect it needs improvements in a few aspects (design,
> performance), but it works quite well.
> Anyone can see how it looks (ideally from a laptop-or-bigger window!) with
> this URL:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon?withJS=MediaWiki:Gadget-mobile-sidebar.js=MediaWiki:Gadget-mobile-sidebar.css
> Or here's a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/juXqcKW.png
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 5:26 PM Strainu  wrote:
>
> > The main problem I see with that is that is changing all the on-wiki
> > templates and scripts that work with the current skin. There is also a
> > question of opportunity: with less and less desktop users, it just
> > makes more sense to invest in the mobile experience (and the beta mode
> > there is super cool, but still breaks some templates).
>
>
> Templates that still have problems on mobile at some wikis, can usually be
> fixed with the assistance of this page (especially section #12)
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Recommendations_for_mobile_friendly_articles_on_Wikimedia_wikis
> -- I'll be sending a reminder to a few VillagePumps about this in the next
> few weeks.
>
> Gadgets/scripts sometimes work as expected across different skins, and
> sometimes not. That's a very different and distinct problem from templates.
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 8:58 PM Aron Manning  wrote:
>
> > That's nice. Try these redesigns with an adblocker for a comparison:
>
>
> I've just added a new batch of links that I learned about yesterday, to
> that page. ;)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesigns=930505897=913318977=source
>
>
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 1:38 PM Todd Allen  wrote:
>
> > Erm, I remember what websites looked like in 1996. I even made some then.
> > It looks nothing like that.
> >
> > On the other hand, on the site you linked to? The first thing I see is an
> > absolutely huge photo of a robot looking at me. I have to scroll down past
> > that to get to the actual meat, the text content. *That* looks like 1996.
> >
> > I'll take the way we have it over that, thanks very much.
>
>
> I initially learned HTML from this site/book c.1998,
> https://web.archive.org/web/2818170520/http://www.arsdigita.com/books/panda/index.html
> and ever since I've appreciated clean simple structured content. I
> completely understand what you mean here, Todd. Although I'd balance it out
> with: not-all-wikis-are-Wikipedia, and hence some of the Wikivoyages have
> their distinct intro-landscape-image design, e.g.
> https://es.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Tokio
>
> I think we all generally endorse incremental improvements, instead of
> drastic overhauls. Overhauls can make many users (of any site) confused or
> frustrated, and our users (readers and editors) are the whole point of this
> endeavour. The problem is there simply haven't been many improvements to
> the basic site-design elements over 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[John Erling Blad]

I don't see any reason to turn this into a help thread, but yes there
are a few browsers that don't fully support responsive design. For
example IE11 has trouble with responsive images.[1]

Mobile best Practices become a W3C Recommendation 29 July 2008, we're
not compliant as far as I know.[2]

[1] https://caniuse.com/#feat=picture
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 12:39 AM Todd Allen  wrote:
>
> I'm not using my cell phone. I'm using an actual computer with a 28"
> monitor.
>
> There's really no excuse, in web design, for something aside from the
> content to absolutely overwhelm the whole monitor on a first view. That
> robot image should be about a third of its size.
>
> Todd
>
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 4:22 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> > Try holding your cellphone vertically.
> >
> > tor. 12. des. 2019, 22.38 skrev Todd Allen :
> >
> > > Erm, I remember what websites looked like in 1996. I even made some then.
> > > It looks nothing like that.
> > >
> > > On the other hand, on the site you linked to? The first thing I see is an
> > > absolutely huge photo of a robot looking at me. I have to scroll down
> > past
> > > that to get to the actual meat, the text content. *That* looks like 1996.
> > >
> > > I'll take the way we have it over that, thanks very much.
> > >
> > > Todd
> > >
> > > On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 2:48 PM John Erling Blad 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Could we please update them with a slightly more up-to-date skin?
> > > >
> > > > Take a look at our Norwegian competitor in the lexicon field.
> > > > https://snl.no/kunstig_intelligens
> > > >
> > > > John Erling Blad
> > > > /jeblad
> > > > ___
> > > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
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> > > > 
> > > ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[Amir E. Aharoni]

‫בתאריך יום ה׳, 12 בדצמ׳ 2019 ב-23:37 מאת ‪Pine W‬‏ <‪wiki.p...@gmail.com
‬‏>:‬

> I'm thinking out loud here. Are there any estimates of would be required in
> terms of time (both staff time and community time) and money to make
> templates and other tools be much easier to globalize across wikis and
> across skins? I'm looking for an answer that is more specific than "a lot",
> but isn't a promise or a detailed estimate.
>

Difficult to say.

I won't make an actual time estimation, because I'm very bad at doing it,
and because I have too many conflicts of interest ;)

However, I do hope to give you something more specific than "a lot". I
envision the following feasible plan for "global modules and templates,
phase 1":
* Make a localization framework for modules. (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238417 ; probably, but not necessarily,
mostly by staff)
* Develop a documentation page and a framework for making robust modules (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238532 ; probably, but not necessarily,
mostly by staff).
* Make modules storable and loadable from a global repository, and
*actually enable it on all Wikimedia projects* (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T41610 ; probably, but not necessarily,
mostly by staff).
* Migrate most local modules from all the wikis to using global modules,
and deleting all the migrated local modules. This will have to be done by
the editors communities in many wikis, and it will only be feasible if all
the points above are planned and executed well. The challenges I expect at
this step are:
** Making sure that just the right amount of things are global and
everything that communities want to override locally can be conveniently
overridden.
** Making tough choices about which modules to use when several communities
developed modules with similar functionality. For example: English, French,
Russian, Spanish, and Hebrew Wikipedias have modules for loading Wikidata
values. They aren't the same, but they probably should be. Merging them
into a global module will require a lot of good-faith collaboration.

Note that I only mentioned modules. Templates have some extra challenges.
But once modules are done well, a "phase 2" of this project, that would
tackle templates, will become possible. Also, global gadgets will have to
be a separate project. Maybe the same localization framework can be used
for both modules and gadgets, but I cannot think of anything else that they
really have in common.

All of the above is my interpretation of discussions in the recent Tech
Conf in Atlanta (other people may have a significantly different
interpretation). See these Phab tasks, and the web of other tasks linked to
them:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234661
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T52329
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[Shlomi Fish]

Hello John,

On Thu, 12 Dec 2019 14:01:46 +0100
John Erling Blad  wrote:

> I wrote 1996 in the subject field because that was the year I made a
> wikisite with tabbed interface, and experimented with a paper-like
> design in Xt. More or less what designers today would call a material
> design. The present design is what I would call Monobook 2.0, and that
> imply a 15 year old design. Monobook was rolled out in 2004-2005 if I
> remember correctly.
> 

In that case, it was flamebait and provocative.

> At nowiki we had a discussion with a designer from The Oslo School of
> Architecture and Design around 2009, and he come up with a really nice
> design. The design at SNL (the other Norwegian lexicon) starts to look
> more and more like it. The design proposal was deemed to radical and
> to simple for Wikipedia. He got several awards for the design.
> 
> No, I'm not a designer, but I do like good design.
> 

Like I said, I do not find the current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
design lacking, except for the fact it may not be mobile-friendly (or so called
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design ) enough, which is a
difficult problem to tackle.

> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 1:34 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:
> >
> > Thank you, but discussing how your site or any other specific site
> > looked like in some year is an distraction.
> >
> > On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 12:30 PM Shlomi Fish 
> > wrote:  
> > >
> > > Hi John!
> > >
> > > On Wed, 11 Dec 2019 22:47:21 +0100
> > > John Erling Blad  wrote:
> > >  
> > > > Could we please update them with a slightly more up-to-date skin?
> > > >
> > > > Take a look at our Norwegian competitor in the lexicon field.
> > > > https://snl.no/kunstig_intelligens
> > > >  
> > >
> > > I took a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and it doesn't
> > > look anything like a geocities/etc. site from the 90s, and I feel it
> > > doesn't look bad.
> > >
> > > For the record that was my site at around 1998 -
> > > https://old-1998-site.shlomifish.org/ and people complained enough that my
> > > current site looks like "[insert  year here]" that I added a FAQ entry:
> > >
> > > https://www.shlomifish.org/meta/FAQ/site_looks_old.xhtml
> > >
> > > See https://everybootstrap.site/ for how many contemporary sites look
> > > like.
> > >
> > > Someone on freenode told me he thinks plain black-on-white sites look
> > > great.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > >
> > > Shlomi
> > >  
> > > > John Erling Blad
> > > > /jeblad
> > > > ___
> > > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to:
> > > > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
> > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > > >   
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > >
> > > Shlomi Fish   https://www.shlomifish.org/
> > > https://www.shlomifish.org/lecture/C-and-CPP/bad-elements/
> > >
> > > As it turns out, compiling a C program from more than 20 years ago is
> > > actually a lot easier than getting a Rails app from last year to work.
> > > — https://passy.svbtle.com/building-vim-from-1993-today
> > >
> > > Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply
> > > .  



-- 

Shlomi Fish   https://www.shlomifish.org/
List of Graphics Apps - https://shlom.in/graphics

Tech needs less wizards, ninjas, and rockstars, and way more sociologists.
— https://twitter.com/nslater/status/545592700289155072

Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[Amir E. Aharoni]

‫בתאריך יום ו׳, 13 בדצמ׳ 2019 ב-2:13 מאת ‪Nick Wilson (Quiddity)‬‏ <‪
nwil...@wikimedia.org‬‏>:‬

> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 5:26 PM Strainu  wrote:
>
> > The main problem I see with that is that is changing all the on-wiki
> > templates and scripts that work with the current skin. There is also a
> > question of opportunity: with less and less desktop users, it just
> > makes more sense to invest in the mobile experience (and the beta mode
> > there is super cool, but still breaks some templates).
>
>
> Templates that still have problems on mobile at some wikis, can usually be
> fixed with the assistance of this page (especially section #12)
>
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Recommendations_for_mobile_friendly_articles_on_Wikimedia_wikis
> -- I'll be sending a reminder to a few VillagePumps about this in the next
> few weeks.
>

The instructions on this page are probably correct, but the practical
problem with this attitude is that to actually get it to work, it has to be
discovered, read, understood, and acted upon by people from 900 wikis, and
much less than half of these wikis have people who have the necessary
programming skills to do all of this. And, as you say, you need to say
reminders.

This is different from extensions, which are developed once and used
everywhere. The only thing that needs to be done to make them fully usable
is translating them, which is a reasonable thing to request. Some
extensions, such as Citoid and Wikilove, do need local adaptations to
actually be useful, but these are exceptions that prove the rule: it would
be better if these local adaptations weren't needed.

That's why templates need to be global, so that there will be a repository
of templates that are written once and usable everywhere. (Some templates
should be converted to extensions, but it's far from feasible to do it with
all templates.)

One crucial thing that makes templates (and gadgets) relevant to any major
redesign project is that the designers and the developers who will work on
it should themselves be accustomed to seeing them in the content or next to
it, or at least to have a way to experience them easily in a language they
know. This is possible to do in a scalable way only if they are global.
(Some people assume that all templates are available in English, but it's
very, very far from being true. The innovation in templates in Russian,
French, Hebrew, Persian, and many other languages is amazing and mostly
unknown to English-only Wikipedians. But that's a topic for a different
thread. Maybe I'll start a series of blog posts titled "non-English
Wikipedia template of the week"?)

Gadgets/scripts sometimes work as expected across different skins, and
> sometimes not. That's a very different and distinct problem from templates.
>

Indeed. It's tempting to think that global templates and global gadgets are
the same project, but they aren't.

I focus my efforts on promoting the idea of the necessity of global
templates and modules, which are also distinct from each other, but much
more closely related. Gadgets should be global, too, however.
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