As multilingual content grows, interlanguage links become longer on
Wikipedia articles. Articles such as "Barak Obama" or "Sun" have more than
200 links, and that becomes a problem for users that often switch among
several languages.
As part of the future plans for the Universal Language Selector, we were
considering to:
- Show only a short list of the relevant languages for the user based on
geo-IP, previous choices and browser settings of the current user. The
language the users are looking for will be there most of the times.
- Include a "more" option to access the rest of the languages for which
the content exists with an indicator of the number of languages.
- Provide a list of the rest of the languages that users can easily scan
(grouped by script and region ao that alphabetical ordering is possible),
and search (allowing users to search a language name in another language,
using ISO codes or even making typos).
I have created a prototype <http://pauginer.github.io/prototype-uls/#lisa> to
illustrate the idea. Since this is not connected to the MediaWiki backend,
it lacks the advanced capabilities commented above but you can get the idea.
If you are interested in the missing parts, you can check the flexible
search and the list of likely languages ("common languages" section) on the
language selector used at http://translatewiki.net/ which is connected to
MediaWiki backend.
As part of the testing process for the ULS language settings, I included a
task to test also the compact interlanguage designs. Users seem to
understand their use (view
recording<https://www.usertesting.com/highlight_reels/qPYxPW1aRi1UazTMFreR>),
but I wanted to get some feedback for changes affecting such an important
element.
Please let me know if you see any possible concern with this approach.
Thanks
--
Pau Giner
Interaction Designer
Wikimedia Foundation
In case you haven't seen, User:Rillke on Commons has implemented a
(default-on!) gadget that makes it possible to subscribe to
notifications of different types, e.g. policy changes, new features,
etc. These are shown as watchlist banners and upon login.
Here's a screenshot of the "subscription" interface:
http://i.imgur.com/gdImENz.png
IMO that type of gadget lends supports to the notion of shooting for a
subscription model to be ultimately integrated with Echo so that users
can get standard read-once notifications about things they care about
while keeping the core UI clutter-free.
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Hi design team, Trevor, James et al.,
There are a few issues with the hybrid section link editing UI
deployed with VisualEditor:
* Because it's a mouseover action, it doesn't translate to touch interfaces.
* If you prefer to edit source, you basically have to train yourself
to target an invisible link in order to not be delayed by the
animation.
* Because the animation triggers on mouseover, it can be distracting
while scrolling/reading.
In my view, we need to consider an alternative default experience
soon. I've seen the current behavior commonly cited as a reason to opt
out of the the VE beta.
The team rejected static [edit] [edit source] source, I think
reasonably, because of too much clutter in the section headings.
My suggestion would be to take a similar approach to the mobile site:
have an icon for section editing (e.g. pencil) and maybe a different
one for source editing (e.g. "<>" which is commonly used to switch
into source mode in RTEs).
The one other alternative is to get rid of the animation and set the
behavior via preference.
I think this problem would benefit from a few more approaches being
kicked around.
Cheers :)
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Hello,
That's all in the title, the new login widget is left align, letting
the center of the page/screen empty on wide screen. What about centering
it?
--
Association Culture-Libre
http://www.culture-libre.org/
What about taking Brandon's idea but keeping them close to eachother and
short:
[edit] [s]
or
[edit | s]
It's as short as you can get while keeping the primacy of 'edit'. Also,
the letter 's' makes sense for either 'source' or 'section'.
No idea what basic usability/design conventions that breaks, but I imagine
2 small icons won't be much more intuitive than a letter with a tooltip.
Alternately, with Erik's idea:
[edit] [<>]
In any case, as a reader, and even just as an editor I think the
distraction of the animation makes the clutter tradeoff worth making.
Cheers,
Jake Orlowitz
Wikipedia: Ocaasi <http://enwp.org/User:Ocaasi>
I droped some drafts here :
https://fr.wikiversity.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Psychoslave/edit_emphase
Le 2013-07-26 12:06, Mathieu Stumpf a écrit :
> Le 2013-07-26 11:13, Matthew Flaschen a écrit :
>> We need to be careful we're not de-emphasizing the edit link, when
>> we
>> want to increase participation. "text + icon" would probably be
>> more
>> noticeable than text alone, but I'm not sure an icon alone is more
>> noticeable than text in this case.
>
> Then we may have an "edit toolbar" which would be fixed on the right
> of the page, would that be be an enough discret emphase?
>>
>> Matt Flaschen
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Design mailing list
>> Design(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
--
Association Culture-Libre
http://www.culture-libre.org/
Flagging this bug for the folks on this list:
"Make Wikipedia distinct by styling of a prominent UI feature differently
than the default"
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51912
To be clear, I know about ongoing work to develop and implement visual
identity guidelines. The bug above is related but much narrower in scope,
referring specifically to a problem incurred as a side-effect of the
popularity of MediaWiki as a platform.
---
Ori Livneh
ori(a)wikimedia.org
It has always concerned me that all the Wikimedia wikis look the same.
The main concern here is the majority of wiki's based on MediaWiki
thus look associated. I remember 5 years ago I used to think that
WikiTravel was a Wikimedia project because the branding was so
similar.
I can imagine MediaWiki.org using the default skin would be of value
for attracting new users by making this distinction but has there ever
been talk about configuring a different skin (even slightly different
- say something as simple as colour scheme) for Wikimedia projects?
Personally I'd love to see every project have it's own skin and own
way of expressing itself. Am I alone here in this desire?
People interested in the design of Wikipedia articles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-07-10/Dispa…
"The issue of concern is the extent to which infoboxes are becoming
generally less efficient in fulfilling the function for which they were
initially introduced. I believe it is time to reconsider the tendency
towards overdetailing that has developed in recent years, and to look
for a new approach."
Discussion probably belongs on the discussion section of that page or in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Infoboxes .
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
