TJFrazier
Editing notes to myself edit
updated (since my last visit) N.b.: This is deprecated. Use SPAN.
Copied comments for development I WANT to see edit
Some unrelated issues while I'm here:
Implement the ability to do hierarchical structures for long articles and/or complex subjects with "subject overview" pages and nested subpages, linked by "breadcrumbs" navigation at the top of pages.
Completely re-structure and organize the entire non-content areas of Wikimedia. It is an absolute usability nightmare to find any editing instructions, make suggestions, etc. Model who the different users are, what each user-type needs, and give each of them a link to a page with all, and just, their needs. I'm an occasional Wikipedia editor. I need a page I can go to with really concise, coherent, locked/non-discussed editing information (policies, style book, coding), and a way to report problems and make suggestions I can't deal with myself. I'd be happy to glance at a section where other casual editors post questions to see if I have any helpful answers for them -- this should be a new type of non-editable "question"/"reponse"-posts bulletin board, collapsed initially to a list of question subject lines, expand the question subject to read the question, and see a list of collapsed response subject lines. (This is also a suggestion for article Talk sections). Then off to the side of my "casual editor portal page", give me a panel of links to other stuff -- with an explanation of what each section actually does (Wikimedia Commons Village Pump??? Am I going to discuss George Bush there, or 1911 problems on Wikipedia, or uploading images to Wikimedia?)
Thank you for herding all of these comments to their appropriate location(s)... somewhere.
Oh -- and another thing. "Blind Wiki". (OK -- you PC the name for me). Wikipedia articles processed to remove (and describe) images, formatting that can't be machine spoken, etc., and then tested by volunteers with text-to-speech software. Set up some official coordination with a blind institution...
- Just to add a few things here (I suffer the same problems as parent, the place for mediawiki suggestion/discussion appears not to exist for ordinary WP'ians - apart from jumping through the hoops of joining mailing lists etc.).
- It struck me while reading through the current WP main page redesign talk page that the software needs to seriously be changed in regard to the formatting of talk. A bulletin board style would be most ideal, but obviously would require a large amount of coding, so I can see why that might not happen. However a simple solution would be to colour code threading in talk, ie. original 'post' is black, reply using ":" is blue, second reply "::" is green etc. etc. A two colour scheme would even be enough, just something to make talk a bit easier to follow. I mean have a look at the main page drafting talk
- This is a project that is trying to reach consensus! - I struggle to even follow who is saying what as it all merges into one homogeneous jumble. If talk was just some added 'chat' feature then it wouldn't matter - but for core components of WP it is the pumping heart, where discussion and consensus are required before anything can happen. If it is as merged and difficult to interpret as that then it just makes everything that much harder, and makes everything take twice as long.
- As with parent - feel free to move this to a more sensible place (if such a place exists, I browsed for 10 minutes looking, but didn't find a basic mediawiki suggestions page) SFC9394 23:27, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
Copied Comment edit
Hello, You are most welcome to use my views for any possible changes! I am afraid I don't have the abilities to throw them into the mediawiki mill, but if you have the opportunity then it would be a welcome set of changes. The 'make-do' approach to a lot of the shortcomings of the mediawiki software frustrate me somewhat - quite a few of the veterans who have been here for a long time seem to be just happy with a talk page looking like machine code output! SFC9394 13:11, 26 February 2006 (UTC)