User talk:John Vandenberg

 Dear, Welcome to MediaWiki.org !

Yes, Welcome! This site is dedicated to the documentation of the MediaWiki software, the software behind many wikis, including that of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Please, take a look at the following pages. They might prove useful to you as a newcomer here:
 * Project:About
 * How does MediaWiki work?
 * Help:Editing pages
 * Help:Navigation
 * Manual:FAQ

If you have any questions, please ask me on my talk page. Once again, welcome, and I hope you quickly feel comfortable here, and find this site a beneficial documentation of the MediaWiki software. Thanks, and regards, .. Cometstyles 09:39, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Eth Just-
Can you welcome me --Eth Just- 22:42, 21 May 2010 (UTC)Eth Just-

User talk:Splarka
John. Do you know of anyone who might be able to help us with this? — billinghurst  sDrewth  11:11, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Image:Toolbar edittools id.wiki.png
What's happening there? I've never seen a worse toolbar. --Nemo 12:18, 15 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Mostly user:bennylin adding admin/patrolling tools to id:MediaWiki:Edittools because they dont have something like w:WP:TWINKLE. John Vandenberg (talk) 13:10, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Cheers. Any suggestion/improvement would be greatly appreciated. Bennylin (talk) 08:20, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I think Edittols in their normal position below the save buttons are just fine. :-) --Nemo 00:02, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Wow! Excuse me, Mr. Nemo... it's become public (normal position) for wiki-id user since 2005. How do we replace them as you want and ignore the the public of wiki-id? Uhm... I think SnipManager is one of solutions. I plan to translate into wiki-id.  Ę-oиė   >>>  ™ 06:48, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Browser testing "getting started" link
Hey John,

I promised you a link on Saturday to a "getting started" guide to automated browser testing from the QA team; they've suggested Quality Assurance/Browser testing as a good place start for you (or others) if interested.

Sorry for the slow response!

Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:52, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Talk:Typography refresh
Hi John, I'm getting very depressed around this recent catastrophe. It's clear that the reports from users in other languages are going to be ignored, nobody is filing them in bugzilla. I don't have the energies to impact on this sad situation and it would take a lot of organising to make people in all languages file reports in bugzilla with all the required information (which is a lot). As I can't do anything about this tragedy, the only sensible reaction is to forget it and carry over, but I have no idea how to forget all this. Do you have suggestions? --Nemo 08:21, 11 April 2014 (UTC) P.s.: For now I unwatched all related pages and removed myself from cc of about 40 related bugs. I doubt it will be enough though....
 * I'm not surprised it has turned out this way, but refusal to accept the reality of how bad this was is mind boggling, and I also dont want to waste my time on it while there is such obstinance being demonstrated by a few people. I'm hoping that in a few days the WMF employees will revert this nonsense until they have a solution that is actually better (having done proper impact analysis) for a decently long set of use cases for not English/Latin as that is where most of the edge cases are.  If they intend to blunder on, bug reports are worthless as there are so many and most cant be fixed except by a revert or an upstream fix.  We can expect that soon a lot of sysadmins will be seeking help on mediawiki.org channels when they upgrade and receive complaints from their userbase.  Also chapters and other bloggers in the blog planets should write well illustrated posts showing the result in their language.
 * What sensible things to do, other than forget? Ask for this feature, which is obviously still beta at best, be put back in Beta features under preferences, default enabled if necessary to keep WMF staff feeling like they have done a great job and made progress.  Or create and popularise a gadget to do it?  Create a userscript?  Fork the Vector skin?  Promote monobook or another good skin.  The mobile skin appears to be part of the driving force behind this mess.  IMO having no skin choice for mobile is not good - users should be able to choose which skin is used for mobile, with at least two good mobile optimised skins, and the user should be able to select a non-mobile skin if they dont like the mobile skins.  Sort of related, Fonts can be migrated into Wikidata and a lot more data added, essentially describing what font stacks render each language correctly, and how Wikipedia's have used templates to alter the font stacks for snippets of text in languages other than the wiki's content language.
 * John Vandenberg (talk) 10:10, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
 * A lot of work with fonts was already done with ULS, each font being tested by native speakers. I don't plan to duplicate any of that. Wikimedia volunteers are completely subject to WMF whims, for the others perhaps the only sensible option is to tell everyone they should use monobook. WMF seems convinced that they need to use Vector as playground for their future English Wikipedia restyling, so the sooner people abandon it the better. --Nemo 11:41, 11 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Is the ULS work for fonts available publicly? I asked in IRC office hours/Office hours 2013-11-03 whether their IME work was public, and didnt get a response. John Vandenberg (talk) 00:06, 13 April 2014 (UTC)