User:Mapmaker345

Profile pic from my Twitter

My name is Jamie Gray, I'm a Product Designer (UX/UI Designer) in Brooklyn, NYC.

I'd love to help contribute to the MediaWiki Design direction, and perhaps eventually work for Wikimedia Design Team. MediaWiki sucks absolute ass out-of-the-box. It's a pain in the ass to configure and set up and administer. This stands in the way of the flourishing of humanity's knowledge.

I run several niche MediaWikis, but I hate the software so much that I'm trying to build my own Alternative to MediaWiki. Lol.

Some ideas for MediaWiki

Updated Side Menu

The new Table of Contents (ToC) is awesome, I love the collapsible sections. It would be nice if the old menu was stylistically consistent and also collapsible. I've added this suggestion to Phabricator as #T310301.

My proposal to update the old menu to be consistent with the new Table of Contents design

This proposal is a more elegant solution than the current implementation, which awkwardly has two menu collapse buttons. One for the menu, and another for the Table of Contents. Just combine them into the same thing, y'all.

Category management

• Currently, categories are managed on each page. There is no way to natively manage categories in a proper "category view"
• Such a view would allow users to:
  • rename categories that apply to thousands of pages, without going into each page and editing each instance
  • drag and drop pages into categories
  • view and edit category hierarchies in a single view. CategoryTree currently only allows the viewing of such hierarchies, but not the editing.
  • merge redundant categories

Easier customization

• In `Preferences -> Appearance -> Skin` it would be cool to let us browse other skins, especially ones that are most popular (most downloaded, most used)

Data quality

• Use WikiData objects as a global identifier to bridge users between various wikis
  • does transwiki relate to this idea?
  • user story: "view this article on x other wiki"
• Make data more easily editable like in Notion (this is a UX lift)

Design system

• Borrow UI styles from MediaWiki Alternatives, like Confluence and Notion.so

• Manage UI components in Storybook.js looks like this exists here, nice job!
• Strikethrough style should reduce opacity, thus making the black text gray, and the blue links light blue.

Community

• Tip Jar functionality to be able to send some $ to contributors (a material way of saying "thanks", especially to encourage more high-quality contributions)

Mobile app (iOS)

• While scrolling using the scrollbar, show an overlay of the table of contents so users can quickly scroll to the section they're looking for
• Add a "link" button to each section header (right-alined to the heading title), tap to copy section link to clipboard

Tables as databases

• Similar to Notion or Airtable
• create an instance of a database, ability to reference it elsewhere with different views
• Views that could be provided:
  • Table (needs UX improvements, such as sticky headers)
  • Lists
  • Boards (Kanban)
  • Galleries
• These could be Wikidata objects
  • Wikipedia pages could pull in from Wikidata to populate tables (eg. table populates "Cities with highest population density" based on the "Cities" database in Wikidata, sorted and filtered by "Population density" column

DONE: Sticky Table of Contents sidebar

• In 2018, I wrote about a Table of Contents browser extension I thought of and my buddy helped to code. As the blog post reflects, it appears as thought the newer versions of MediaWiki actually include something somewhat similar.
• 2022: Thanks for building this for us, MediaWiki team!
• 
  My initial sketch of the sticky table of contents
• 
  Animation of the Table of Contents sidebar while the user adjusts the width
• 
  Screenshot showing the newly built MediaWiki sidebar as of 2022

Remaining changes to Table of Contents

• Smooth scrolling to anchor link position
• Keep ToC visible while editing, so we users can keep context of how the page is structured while editing
• Clicking on a ToC item (a header) should briefly highlight the section selected. Especially when the page is already fully scrolled to the bottom and the selected header can't be aligned to the top edge of the browser.
• Show number of child nodes each parent node has in the sidebar (this is good for more extensively outlined pages)

Images

• Ability to drag images on top of one another to create a multi-image gallery. That would be a delightful interaction.

Easier installation / hosting

• Setting up MediaWiki is absolute hell to a non-technical person like myself. Miraheeze should not exist. It should be easy to download the software, point it to a purchased website URL, and have it published. Whatever pricing model MediaWiki needs to make this work, I will happily pay. Make this friction go away. lol.

Imported from Wikipedia page:

I had some ideas from my Wikipedia page that I've imported into here

iOS App

• Show User Page as a normal article
• NavBox support

Visual Editor

• Improve template editing in Visual Editor
• Add support for Talk Pages

Tools: Page information

• Show maintenance tag status over time, to view how quickly an article is fixed
• Visualize a page's context within WikiProjects (similar to how the top of the talk page is used)

Improvements to the "View History" page

• Align elements vertically to make it more readable (a table view, without lines ... instead of a list view with non-aligned elements)
• Show small preview of before & after text changes, without having to click prev or cur buttons
• Wrap the +/- numbers inside of a colored box (like a stock ticker) so it's more visually apparent if it's green or red (green and red text on a white background that is sufficiently readable in terms of contrast is hard to distinguish between black text on a white background)

Better Wikidata Integrations

• Two-way sync between infoboxes and Wikidata objects.

My existence elsewhere on the web

• English Wikipedia - where I discuss my intellectual curiosities
• OpenStreetMap Wiki - ideas for the future of mapping
• Portfolio built in Super.so powered by Notion
• Portfolio built in Squarespace
• I'm also on several other wikis