User talk:Marian

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Welcome to the Wikipedia, Marian! User:Ed Poor

Marian - yay! I'm in favor of making Wikipedia more attractive (call it "eye candy". Me, I like candy) in order to make it more usable. But then, I have Susan Kare bookmarked. O.K. - I think the UI you have posted is very workable. I agree with Verdana. I'm also fond of Arial. Colors are negotiable - yours I like (I hated what went on with wikipedia with colors last month, though it seems to have settled down). I look forward to your contributions. MichaelTinkler

Marian, I think your UI propsal looks great! I'm all for making Wikipedia easier to use, and I think your design would make the project look much more professional too. --Stephen Gilbert

I must say, I like the look you came up with. Not surprising, since you're a pro at this. I think you may have many who're reluctant to abandon the logo, however... given all the discussion and debate that went into establishing it in the first place. Might there be a way to work it in? Or some smaller "representative" symbol? I could be wrong, of course! -- April

While I agree that Arial is good for Headings and quite possibly for interface elements (eg - log in, most wanted, user list etc...), I think that it is a bad idea to use it for the text of articles (unless it is limited to headings and sub-headings). The reasons for this are that serif fonts are generally considered to be easier to read (this is a well-known result), and also that serif fonts often look more professional. In it not necessary to use a very strong serif font, and indeed may be a bad idea (particularly for small font sizes), but many of the reasons for sans-serif fonts are becoming less relevant with the advent of font antialiasing. --The Ostrich

I can't speak for the font properties, since I'm no pro, but I think it looks spiffy. Professional and streamlined. Koyaanis Qatsi


Magnificent! Cruel, though, to tease us with just a PNG and not the HTML/CSS. :) Personally, I like Verdana as well... but it might be a Very Very Good Idea to make the font specification optional; some people are very picky about their fonts and prefer to set them in the browser. (On the other hand, they're free to tell their browser to override the web page's specification, no?) Other thoughts:

  • The two sidebars take up a huge amount of space; articles with large maps, photos, and tables may suffer. Also, will text wrap around them on longer articles, or do we have a fixed column width? The latter is probably more attractive, but always strikes me as inefficient (and annoying when putting two windows side-by-side to compare or copy).
  • You're not using tables for those sidebars, right? Tables for layout be the work of the devil.
  • Make sure there's a place for the multilanguage links (for an example, see the header areas of European Union or Esperanto). They can be shrunken down to two/three-letter codes if need be, but there must be room for them.

Brion VIBBER 2002/03/23

As the original designer of the current layout (and as a fellow student in Cologne;) I think your UI looks much better than the current one and should definitely become one of the available skins in the user preferences. Then we can see how well it works in every-day-wikying;) and make it the default skin if it performs well.

  • I like the Verdana font, as long as it has a fallback option to Arial or Times New Roman (easy enough with CSS). On the "printable version" pages, we should use Times, though, as that is the best font for printing, IMHO.
  • As the current layout is based on tables, I don't have a problem if yours uses tables as well, as long as the midle column doesn't have a fixed width of 666 pixel ;)
  • The two sidebars do look great, but I agree with Brion that they might wreck the layout of the articles, especially on low-res screens (800x600 or worse). How about having everything in the left sidebar, with the background shade of the right one? The user could switch it all to the right, just like you can switch the current sidebar to the left now.
  • I don't have a problem with removing the logo, as long as it is not exchanged for another one. The "logo" on the PNG can be completely made from text.

Really, very nice! --Magnus Manske

Perhaps you could make screenshots of the layout using windows different widths, so we can judge its flexibility better. Matthew Woodcraft

Another vote in favor -- I really would like to see this as one of the skins, perhaps the default skin.

While agree with the Ostrich in theory about readablility and serif fonts, I have to admit I like the overall clean look with the sans serif overall. Ah well . . . ClaudeMuncey

I think this looks great. I would really like it if user's could personalize a few parameters. Someone mentioned fonts. I would like to be able to have this UI in green tones, as MS blue always bothers me and I usually change what I can. Would that be very difficult? On the other hand I wouldn't want to offer a slew of personalizations, just a few. Rose Parks

I created a simple version (only one sidebar) of this UI as a skin. It will become available with the next software update. --Magnus Manske

The new "Cologne blue" skin is a tremendous improvement. I think we should eventually make it the default.

A couple of things I would like to change:

  • The exclamation marks in front of actions are not necessary and without explanation confuse more than they illuminate.
  • The upper right "Log in" should switch to "Log out" if I'm already logged in.
  • If the side box is switched off in preferences, we need at a minimum an "edit this page" link somewhere at the bottom. Also, there's currently a bug which displays the page header at the bottom in this case.
  • The Wikipedia logo in the page header should be a link to the main page. That seems to be the standard behavior on all sites nowadays. Can we spend the screen real estate to use our current logo?
  • "My Settings" should be "My settings", similar to "My watchlist".
  • The row in the upper right should contain a link to wikipedia:Help
  • In the side box, the Edit section should get the link "Edit this page", in addition to "Upload file". I think that's where people would expect it. The link should go away when editing a page.
  • The small font (show diff) should be removed. It looks crappy, and "diff" is not a term that people are familiar with. Just add a new entry "Show last change"
  • "All pages" is pretty useless, and expensive for the server, so I think that doesn't need to be on the sidebar.
  • "Recent Changes" is not self-explanatory. Maybe "Recently changed pages" is clearer.
  • "Myself" should be changed to "My page", because that's what it is.
  • Under "Page options", the link should be "Printable version" instead of "Print", because that's what it is.
  • The section "Page options" should disappear if there are no Page options that apply to the current page, for instance when editing.

Again, please don't mis-interpret this list of criticisms: I am strongly in favor of "Cologne Blue". A similar list of criticisms for the current scheme would be at least three times as long.

AxelBoldt, Sunday, March 31, 2002

Hi Guys! After my pre-diploma I finally found the time to react to all the feedback and created an HTML template for testing. Find it on

www.ds.fh-koeln.de/~marian/wikipedia/template.html

I am going through tests on various browsers right now. Off course, I am interested in your feedback!

Marian, Friday, April 5th, 14:50 CEST

Yay, it looks great! But I'm afraid those tables are just going to have to go. (Thanks in part to the mozilla slllooowwww editing bug... -- try this in moz and you'll see what I mean.) Alternatively, we might take out the sidebar when editing? Probably confusing for users, though. For the language links; in the current CVS code of Magnus' version of Cologne Blue, I've fixed it to include them in the formerly blank space under the HOME | ABOUT | etc bar (the vertical space being already taken up by "THE FREE ENCYCLOPEDIA"). Brion VIBBER

I think I'm done now converting the Cologne Blue to your latest version. Looks quite nice. Still in tables, though...
If the others think it's OK, we'll have to bug Jimbo to update the running version;) And Marian, please give me your SourceForge user name so I can give you write access to the CVS. --Magnus Manske, Friday, April 5, 2002

I really like very much this skin (especially after the font size was specified), it's very elegant and comfortably readable. :-)

Since the discussion on this skin seems to be here, I'd like to ask for just a few (I hope simple) minor features:

  • Could we set different colors for visited links?
  • The last cell at the bottom-right (search box and page details) looses formatting (fonts loose size and face, a badly readable result) and is below the bottom of the article's cell. It could perhaps be moved as another nested table in the above cell (in alternative the cell containing the body of the article could be merged with the one below). Or it could be merged with the cell at its left, with a -hr size 1- line to separate it from the article.

Another possible addition: when there is a redirection, could we read the "redirected from..." in a different color (orange, green, purple, anything that can attract our attention)?

However deep thanks for this work! :-) --Gianfranco, Saturday, May 11, 2002