Talk:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements/Features/Flow

I've just realised that you can select the hamburger meny with one touch of the tabulator key, and when you press it twice your cursor is located in the search box. You can toggle the navigation bar with the enter key when the hamburger menu is selected. This is really nice and useful. I think you should leave it this way and explain it to new users of the new interface. Thanks!

As an editor who prefers a functional, readily accessible user interface I am interested in who has given you the license for such wideranging and some would say disruptive changes.

I am talking especially about:

• the content width limit
• the idea of putting menus in toggle boxes

I would also like to know if there has been any community-focussed discussion on those issues.

Regards, --~~~~

There is not so much information yet on what the dialog opening from the title bar would contain. However, I will try to explain why I think that the users feel that the old Vector's current compact language list dialog is bad vs. the full list of languages.

Compact language list target is that the user selects one language as efficiently as possible. For that purpose, the languages are visible multiple times if they are spoken on different continents. The dialog is also small so the user needs to scroll the box if the user doesn't filter the languages. It is effectively impossible to actually see what languages are. Dialog also doesn't show if the user has been on the page before because the visited link color is the same as the unvisited link.

However, the very common use case for users (i suppose for both, editors and readers) is that they want to open the different language versions of the articles to new tabs. For this they need a.) a clean list of pages and b.) information if they have already opened the page or not.

This is the functionality that the compact language list is breaking. The ability to filter languages is however pretty well-liked, and in this sense the mobile wikipedias filtered list of all languages is better than compact language list (or old interwiki link list)

The W?F has come up with yet another really, really bad idea:

"Sticky site and article headers will allow users to access important functionality (logging in/out, edit, talk pages, etc.) without requiring people to scroll to the top of the page."

Just what we need: a part of the screen that never scrolls and makes the readable area smaller. And of course the W?F will start small and then slowly grow the nonscrollable area by adding more and more clutter, just as they have done with the sidebar.

Speaking of the sidebar; does "collapsible": mean that the readable window gets bigger, or is the plan to keep taking up screen real estate with a big blank section? --Guy Macon (talk) 12:53, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

And here I thought I was the only person in the world who thought the W?F is not acting in the best interest of the community. Obvious problems with the existing system are not fixed, but new (many of which are inferior) features are constantly being pushed out. Sigh...

W?F presents their "improvements" as a fait accompli. As for me, I would prefer that developers restrict themselves to features for which the community asked.

The answer -- something the rest of the world has known for over 20 years but the W?F somehow cannot grasp -- is to give users a choice. Does User A want his header links to stay on his screen? Make that an option in the preferences. Does User B want the header links to scroll up like the rest of the page? Make that an option in the preferences. Want to make the sidebar go away? Option. Preferences. Alas, instead of giving us more choices, the W?F thinks they know better than we do what we do and don't want on our screens. :( --Guy Macon (talk) 15:11, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Like many editors who have been here longterm, these changes are irrelevant to me as I use Monobook, I assume these changes are only to Vector, and as nothing in this set of changes tempts me to move to Vector, you might think my view irrelevant. But I would like to suggest the WMF move from an aesthetic and IT fashion based development approach to an evidence based one. Different skins should have different results in terms of recruiting readers to become editors, of editors exploring more options and becoming more active/accomplished editors, and for longterm retention of editors. There is a hypothesis that the move from the somewhat editor focussed Monobook to the more reader focussed Vector is a contributing factor to our reduced ability to convert readers into editors, and retain our longterm editors. I would feel much more relaxed about these changes if from now on you tested such changes and skins and measured and judged them in terms of editor recruitment, editor engagement level and editor retention. WereSpielChequers (talk) 23:12, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

@Guy Macon if you go to Meta while logged-in, you'll see what they have implemented so far. (I don't think I purposely unticked "use legacy vector"? AFAIR, the "New Coke" just appeared one day.) On checking in private mode just now, it seems they haven't turned it on for anons yet. Re. your question "does 'collapsible': mean that the readable window gets bigger, or is the plan to keep taking up screen real estate with a big blank section?" Yep, the latter, more blank space. I suspect max-width will be one of the more problematic aspects of this redesign, and would like to see a separate preference for that at least.

Actually, after thinking about it, instead of (or in addition to) a setting in Preferences that you have to go out of your way to alter, I'd like the ability to toggle between width-limited and full-wide display depending on the context.

For example, in Windows Notepad I can turn Word Wrap on if I'm viewing a readme file, and off if I'm reading a logfile.

Thanks Pelagic. One has to wonder if this love of blankspace is directly an enabler of advertising or merely indirectly so. Creating white space to be overlaid with advertising being so ingrained into "good design" concepts among IT professionals that it is even embraced as "good practice" without stating the reason for promoting this practice.

Hi, WereSpielChequers. I think it's the other way, that keeping line length readable created extra space on the sides that was utilized for navigation and advertising.

At some point the common page-top horizontal banner ad gave way to vertical strip ads on the sides, maybe when we started to get wider-aspect and higher-resolution desktop monitors.

Contrast that to the printed glossy magazine as an example of a publication which carried a lot of advertising. It was paginated not scrolling, portrait not landscape, with text in 2 to 4 columns, and advertising full-page facing or in an inset box (maybe 1 or 2 columns out of 3 or 4 total). Running a full-height single column sidebar of multiple ads would have been unthinkable in that layout.

Extra space
on the sides
is all well
and good for
someone with
a giant
monitor or
huge tablet
in front of
them but
some folks
have to use
small
screens or
have large
screens but
need to use
large fonts
because
they are
visually
impaired.
By forcing
everyone
to have the
sidebar it
forces
these users
to read
everything
in a narrow
column. Has
anyone else
seen the
"Ow, my
balls!" UI
example in
the movie
Idiocracy?

• Small logo – yes
• Collapsible sidebar – automatic depending on width
• Limiting content width – yes?
• Search box centred – yes
• Language switcher / other projects
  • moved out from left sidebar – yes
  • as a drop-down – yes, at least in medium and narrow layouts
• Sticky header – yes, except in narrow layout
• Page image and shortdesc in search drop-down – no
• User menu – yes
• One-click preferred languages – no
• Sticky ToC – no
• Page tools moved out of left sidebar – yes (drop-down or right sidebar depending on width)

So, by by my reckoning, Timeless is already 8/11 on features.

A sticky or sidebar ToC imo is the largest quality of life improvement since Minerva Neue because on really long articles scrolling back up to the top is *painful*

I've been looking for a skin that has a sidebar ToC for my own wiki and the only one I've found so far is Citizen. Having it be in the base MediaWiki software would be incredibly helpful.

"Visualisation of deployed versions and early concepts" section of this page should be translatable just like the one in Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements. Or, maybe we can consider to make it as a template, so it can be displayed with same translation on both pages.

On English Wikipedia's Village Pump (Proposals), User:ApChrKey suggested a Contributions button at the top of the User page. w:en:Special:Permalink/972207328#Implement an easier way to view a user's contributions

Has the team had any discussions about this? Should contribs stay with Tools, or get a more obvious button like in AMC and Timeless?

Apologies in advance if I shouldn’t be pinging you, OVasileva (W?F) and Quiddity (W?F). Since this board didn’t exist until recently, I shan’t assume you’re subscribed to it yet. Posting here because there’s a lot of noise on the main talk page, and the subpage for Features/Article Tools isn’t yet created.

Quiddity, I just saw on your profile that you’re now with Abstract Wikipedia rather than Desktop Improvements. Is there a new liaison for the latter?

@SGrabarczuk (WMF) FYI this thread. :)

ApChrKey hadn't noticed the User contributions link on the left sidebar until it was pointed out to them, so that serves as an example where the current sidebar layout didn’t help with locating features.

I just built the user script en:User:Jackmcbarn/contribstab.js to add this.