Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Usability/Reducing interface complexity

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Person icon

Re: "Removing the icon to the left of the six tabs at the upper right." I believe is referring to Image:User.gif which I remove by adding this to my css:

/* hide the person-icon by your username-link (at page top) */
li#pt-userpage {background:none}

I agree with the suggestion of removing it altogether, as it doesn't seem to do anything useful. -- Quiddity (talk) 06:35, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] References and citations

The Google Scholar beta with "wikify" option looks great for articles in academic and professional journals. but it only works for "scholarly" sources and topics, so would exclude many non-academic topics (e.g. games, widely-used computer software, events that are important but too recent for academic historians - and a few thousand other categories) and probably many non-academic but reliable sources such New Scientist (which I've used in at least 1 paleontology article) and The Economist. I think Wikipedia needs a references and citations extension to the Edit pages, as discussed at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 8 - someone's already developed a tool that's written in PHP (see the Village pump page cited, and the one to which that discussion links), so it should be easy to bolt on (with a few mods, e.g. a "clipboard" area into which one can copy the full citation details before pasting the right elements into citation form fields - that would save a lot of tabbing between the cited article and the article being edited). I'd prefer to see it open in a new window / tab - I know the "strict" HTML and XHTML DTDs omit the "target" attribute of links, but I notice Wikipedia uses the "transitional" XHTML DTD, which includes "target". Philcha (talk) 22:50, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] References gadget

The project may be interested in User:Mr.Z-man/refToolbar, currently a JavaScript gadget that can be turned on in the preferences Gadgets section. Mr.Z-man 04:50, 27 April 2008 (UTC)