Jkatz (WMF)

Welcome to Meta!

Hello, Jkatz (WMF). Welcome to the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki! This website is for coordinating and discussing all Wikimedia projects. You may find it useful to read our policy page. If you are interested in doing translations, visit Meta:Babylon. You can also leave a note on Meta:Babel or Wikimedia Forum if you need help with something (please read the instructions at the top of the page before posting there). Happy editing!

-- Meta-Wiki Welcome (talk) 21:35, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Best person to give Mobile advice

[Oooo, what an untrampled user talk page; let me leave big muddy footprints. ]

Hi,

I posted the question to James Forrester Who is the best person that the enWS community can approach to get knowledge and assistance with output to mobile format? and he pointed the bone finger in your direction, possibly to point me onwards.

The enWS has noticed that some of our formatting does not always flow well through to mobile format in our reproductions of works. None of us have much knowledge of the mobile format, so are seeking guidance/mentoring on how to continue to produce our works for the desktop and our export to epub, but also to get them right for mobile. Most recent conversation. Noting that I am not the most css literate person, just know enough to get myself into trouble.

Comment about English Wiksource. The enWS approach is to look to faithfully, not slavishly replicate the formatting of works, so there will be components of inline formatting, though we try to use percentages, and a standardised approach through templates. We look to leave right margins free to allow their expansion and contraction for the user's viewing surface. Our works contain tables, images, tables of contents and title pages of works as are presented in the original publications, and these four things generally have the most (complicated) formatting. We have three dynamic layouts available which users can toggle through (in desktop mode); and every work can be be exported to other document formats (sidebar link), though we predominantly see that the forms more desired are .epub and .pdf.

Hope that you got to the end, and that you can point the community in the right direction. Thanks.  — billinghurst sDrewth 14:16, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Hi billinghurst,

Thanks for the question! In the long run, which I have a better understanding of, we want to allow at least one of two things:

• editors can easily preview their content on mobile
• editors can convey the intent of display so that mediwiki can properly transform display according to their wishes in various platforms and devices

Either of these is actually something we will need to collaborate heavily with the editing team and James Forrester, in particular on.

As far as the current transformations we apply in mobile output, I am going to copy James' Product Management trip and direct you to someone else, Jon Robson, who has a much better sense of what works well and what does not in mobile. Actually, Jon, if we don't currently have such a 'best practices guide', perhaps its something we should consider? We would want to develop/maintain a separate one for apps as well, I suppose (though apps currently only support wikipedia content).

Good luck, billinghurst and let me know if you have any follow up questions :)

Jkatz (WMF) (talk)

Timeless Newsletter • Issue 2

Newsletter • August 2018

The second issue of the Timeless newsletter is out.

The news: Themes are coming to Timeless! Your infobox and navbox templates in particular are probably going to look absolutely horrible in the new built-in night mode.

For more information, background, plans and progress updates, please see the full issue on Meta, complete with a ridiculous list of phabricator task links, gratuitous mention of other skins, and me complaining about the current state of MediaWiki skinning in general.

-— Isarra ༆ 01:48, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Timeless Newsletter • Issue 3

Newsletter • December 2018

Welcome to the third issue of the Timeless newsletter, complete with a somewhat dubious explanation of where I've been all this time.

Somewhat dubious explanation of where I've been all this time:

I suffered a rather bad concussion in October, which knocked me pretty much completely out of commission through November, and I'm still recovering even now. One person = bus factor of one, even though it wasn't actually a bus but a very short flight of stairs.

Updates:

• Random bugs have been fixed. More bugs have been found. For a full list of horrors, see the workboard.
• Implementing themes (T131991: the dark/night mode and winter variants of the skin) has proven far more complicated than initially thought, lacking either the extension, or preferably, some core support for this functionality. Thus:
  • I have submitted a Request for Comment proposing to merge Extension:Theme into core - this will enable skins to specify style variants as distinct options for users to select in their preferences by letting the skin specify the styles separately for each, a much neater way of implementing this than some of the existing hacks.
  • Jack Phoenix has already submitted a patch to do this. We simply need the buy-in and consensus to merge it, and to resolve whatever issues may arise from this wider review.

Comments on the RfC (MediaWiki wiki RfC page, task) or bugs, or further reports, are always appreciated.

Until next time, hopefully with no further injuries,

-— Isarra ༆ 22:35, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Timeless Newsletter • Issue 4

Newsletter • April 2019

Welcome to the fourth issue of the Timeless newsletter, with a cat! Or maybe not.

Un chat qui miaule???

It's true! The angry cat, a fundamental part of Timeless, has resulted in confusion and bug reports all across the projects and phabricator. And now it shall be immortalised forever in the new, shiny Timeless logo.

Updates:

After putting off the project for three months because I got hit in the head with a flight of stairs, and then putting off the project for another two months while working out what the status of the grant was, I have now put off the project even more in order to focus on my other project for a bit. So progress lately has been a bit whims-based as a result:

• The project now has a logo. For some reason.
• The angry cat in the background is now customisable! Behold: not a cat. What would you like to replace it with on your project?
• I broke, unbroke, and then sort of sideways broke all the form styles. Help.

Radar:

• The French Wiktionary voted to set Timeless as their default skin, with results possibly as you might expect: I ran away and hid, and the WMF said no. A bit of discussion later and we largely agreed that all else aside, this is a bit of a branding issue, but we love the enthusiasm! Also the bug reports that inevitably come out of such a discussion. I'm still working on properly going through those.
• Theme support is still stuck in limbo, but now we have another skinning RfC. tl;dr, we wanna replace the entire skinning system, and Skizzerz'll write a prototype later.

I will be fully resuming work on Timeless next week, or maybe the week after, depending on what madness (or illness) comes out of the Hackathon in Prague. Please come talk to me there to discuss strategy!

-— Isarra ༆ 16:51, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Timeless Newsletter • Issue 5

Newsletter • August 2019

Welcome to the fifth and final issue of the Timeless newsletter!

Progress was made. True story.

I am happy to announce that after about a year, this delightful project in which absolutely nothing has gone according to plan is coming to a close. Or at least, the grant-funded portion is. Which means we will now be resuming our regular schedule of random whims-based development, you probably won't notice any difference whatsoever unless you use MonoBook, and there's a report.

What's new from the past two months:

A lot less than we'd hoped, frankly. We:

• Fixed various bugs, some of which even weren't for stuff I'd just broken two patches previously.
• Resolved sundry compatibility issues for other extensions, templates onwiki, whatever, largely by removing dumb crap from the css.
• Implemented some shiny new features you'll probably hate or just never use or actually see, like click-toggled dropdowns, icons everywhere, and options to select a default layout or set an image for the site header wordmark.
• Brought the total number of open tasks on the Timeless workboard down to 70.

We also wound up with:

• Patches resulting in RelatedArticles working in MonoBook, and FlaggedRevisions showing up in Minerva, unless someone actually managed to turn that off as well. (Blame T181242.) It's possible we went a little overboard with the whole 'let's close all the tasks!' sprint.
• An unfortunate repeated discovery that themes (the Night/Winter variants I keep insisting will happen at some point) are still pretty far off on the horizon. Um.
• Possibly a quite a few more bugs coming your way. This month, and especially the past week, have been a bit of a mess, development-wise. While hopefully none of the worse issues make it to production, please keep the reports coming for whatever you do find and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can. Y'all've been amazing about this, and it's really appreciated.

And I guess that's that. I'm really bad at reporting, and this is a report. For the purposes of the grant, this was a requirement, but do you want me to keep trying to send these out?

-— Isarra ༆ 18:08, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

Best of luck

with whatever comes next.  — billinghurst sDrewth 07:19, 9 July 2021 (UTC)