Screenshot of enhanced toolbar
I am happy to announce that the first set of usability improvements is scheduled to be integrated in MediaWiki and will be enabled as one of user preferences in Wikipedia in the first week of July. The nickname for this release is called Acai. The release names will follow the names of tropical fruits in alphabetical order. The description of features are found in this release page. The major improvements are; 1) reorganized tabs which clearly indicates the state of “Read” and “Edit”, 2) enhanced edit toolbar which is expandable based on users’ needs, 3) search result page which hides the clutter and make search results more visible, and etc. We are still combating with IE6 bugs , but come and play with the prototypes and let us know your feedback. On the localization front, we have introduced a set of new texts for localization. If you are a MediaWiki translator, your collaboration on localization is greatly appreciated as always.
Naoko Komura
#1 by Nihiltres on June 25th, 2009
This is good news. I’m looking forward to testing the new skin in a more “live” way.
#2 by Nick J on June 26th, 2009
My 2 cents: The tabs are nice and look great, go with it! The edit toolbar hiding is nice. I’m only unsure whether highlighting a word then clicking bold, and then highlighting the same word and clicking bold again, should remove the bolding, rather than adding the bolding twice. I have concerns about search results though, and wonder if they could be simplified further. Why does a non-technical user (or most users) care about this line: “12 KB (1833 words) – 02:50, 30 April 2009″? Perhaps this line could be removed? Also the space is not used very efficiently in the search results: compare a Google search for “test” versus a search on the prototype site for “test”. The Google results have 10 results (on my screen) with 2 lines max text each, in a smaller font, and “feels right” to me. The prototype results have 8 results, some with 3 lines of text each, in a larger font. So suggest showing more results on the page, with max 2 lines of excerpted contents, and a slightly smaller font. Also the Google results don’t include HTML tags, but the prototype results do include wiki tags/braces/markup/etc, which most users do not want to see. But please understand that this is not intended in any way to discourage you – improvement in the layout of the search results is badly needed, I just want it to go even further! :-)
– All the best,
Nick.
#3 by Database on June 26th, 2009
Okay, that looks very, very nice. I love the new sidebar and tabs.