Have you noticed the “Try Beta” link on the top of Wikimedia project sites? The usability team is proud to introduce the new skin, Vector, and the enhanced toolbar. Well, they have been available from user preferences over a month now, but we wanted to reach out to anonymous users. Please check it out and let us know your thought, if you haven’t tried already. We deployed a bunch of bug fixes since the release on July 1st. Right-to-left languages are fully supported, and you will see integrated special characters in the tool bar. If you are a administrator of Wikimedia project sites, we would like to ask you a favor. Please consider removing the special character menu below the editing dialogue box in edit page. As special characters are easily accessible from the toolbar, it will be good to reduce the duplication to make the page simplified. The special character in the toolbar has generic universal set. If you find missing character sets or have a request, please let us know through the project page or file an enhancement request via bugzilla under User Interface.
Arigato!
Naoko Komura
Usability Initiative
"Try Beta" screenshot
Special Characters screenshot
#1 by SJML on August 7th, 2009
Is this currently available in Mediawiki itself?
#2 by Naoko on August 7th, 2009
Hi, SJML.
Yes, it is available in MediaWiki as an extension.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UsabilityInitiative
Check it out, and let us know your opinion.
Best,
- Naoko
#3 by River Tarnell on August 8th, 2009
Surely it would be a bad idea to remove the special characters until “beta” becomes the default? Otherwise, how will people not using it enter those characters?
#4 by Roan Kattouw on August 8th, 2009
As River pointed out, removing the usual special characters is a bad idea because the toolbar isn’t enabled by default for everyone, and currently impossible to enable for anonymous users without creating an account. Removing the old special chars should not be discussed until some time after the toolbar is enabled globally.
#5 by Isabelle Ayel on August 8th, 2009
I do not understand why this Vector skin is not included in the mediawiki package. Wikipedia foundation is based on great philosophy about “knowledge for everyone, everything opens” but development through Wikipedia are scarcely shared to Mediawiki. Mediawiki is also a big open source community which can benefit to Wikipedia community.
Thx a lot for the extension, anyway.
#6 by Naoko on August 9th, 2009
My request was based on the idea that it is possible to hide special characters at the bottom of the edit page just for Vector. If there is no flexibly to hide special characters based on the skin type, yeah it makes sense to wait.
Thanks for pointing out the important point.
#7 by Naoko on August 9th, 2009
Please see my comment #2. The extension is available publicly under GPL. In addition, work-in-progress code is checked in to the code repository.
#8 by Nate on August 10th, 2009
It looks a little like youtube…
#9 by brion on August 10th, 2009
The Vector skin is being worked on in the development version of MediaWiki and will be part of the 1.16 release. The updated edit toolbar and other bits are not directly tied to Vector, and are so far being developed as extensions, to be merged into core as they mature. All are available from our public SVN code repository.
#10 by Alex on August 14th, 2009
Yeah, looks similar with Youtube
#11 by vailu on August 15th, 2009
Arigato!
Naoko Komura.
#12 by Venkatesh Varalu on August 20th, 2009
Looks good. But more things could be improved. I know this is old, but how about a better editor?