Jack Rabbit

Re: Not a submission

Hi again. Thanks for showing me your design. In particular, I like your idea of tailoring the borders to the current skin. I'll have to play with that.

Wikipedia has long settled for inferior designs, with the good proposals always coming in late. Forseti's proposal for www.wikipedia.org is a good example. But in a way, I'm glad my design came a month too late for the English Wikipedia. Even if I'd been able to submit it on time, I probably wouldn't've enjoyed justifying every little bit of it to the crowd there.

Fortunately, the community here has been more open-minded and supportive. Some of the more radical changes have been a tough sell – like moving the About section to the bottom, where blogs often have it – but I think the biggest challenge for me is coming up with a good process for uploading cropped background images. So I'm going to focus on getting the Vietnamese Wikipedia a rock-solid design.

Change is coming one way or another. The Foundation is making noises about a new skin, Athena, and if we don't do a good job of reimagining our Main Pages, the Foundation will do it for us. If we can improve our main pages before Athena is done, we may be able to retain more community control over what goes there.

 – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 07:40, ngày 26 tháng 10 năm 2012 (UTC)

Good luck with it. It's not just borders that can be tweaked per the skin; other aspect of the page layout, too... When I put that together, my core focus was on refactoring the mp markup to not use inline styling and to drop the pastels and boxy look. The whole en:main page needs a much deeper re-think and the sea-of-idiots-and-trolls called the en:community thinks poorly. (aside: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/why-are-states-so-red-and-blue/ Pinker's a sharp guy; his analysis can be mapped to wiki-dynamics;)

See the discussions I had on en:wp w/Quiddity, starting with the one I linked on your talk; the en:Howard Roark quote re second-handers. English Wikipedia is a failed project. They are seeking the norm of a culture that peaked in the last century and is in decline. I've long noted that vi:wp is growing like gangbusters. A refreshing bounce-back from conditions 40 years ago. Asia's the future; I know, having lived there for many years. Have a look around places like San Jose; you see the future there, too. Kansas is simply asleep.

I've looked at some of the discussions, here, about the main page redesign. I'm using gTranslate/Chrome, and that tints things with poor phrasing and adds an impression of rancour that's mostly not really there. But this is a more healthy community. I've not looked at your design "live" (feel free to set me up with the .css and .js I need). For backgrounds in variable width containers, centring and allowing the edges to be cropped works well. You may be doing this; I didn't look too closely.

I'm aware of Athena; one of the people I pinged about my redesign was Jorm, who didn't comment. WMF should take a stronger role in things like main pages, but they won't; Gardner called the en:main page "homely" and meant it in a good sense. They're all about being meek before the puling masses. Traffic is everything at that level.

Jack Rabbit (thảo luận) 23:05, ngày 27 tháng 10 năm 2012 (UTC)

Guess I misread the Foundation's intentions with Athena, then. I'm glad they value Wikipedia's "homeliness", but if their idea of homeliness requires pastel-colored boxes, I'm glad they aren't taking a strong role! The design I'm working on is still pretty understated compared to other online encyclopedias' front pages.

Anyhow, looks like you're all set to view Thành viên:Mxn/Trang Chính 4 with the code you added to Thành viên:Jack Rabbit/common.js. (If it doesn't look right, try clearing your cache. If it still doesn't look right, please let me know!) Indeed, the design relies on cropping images inside blocks with overflow: hidden set. But we'd still have to upload cropped versions of all the images, to keep everyone from having to download a bunch of 800×600-pixel images just to see the main page. The current version uses tons of inline styles, but only temporarily, just so people get a half-decent result without importing the stylesheet.

I'm definitely going to have to make some tweaks for the Standard and Cologne Blue skins. There are plenty more things to do, of course, before this design is ready for primetime. I'll try and find some time next weekend.

I haven't given up on the English Wikipedia, but maybe that's because I'm not particularly engaged in it. I've tried my best to stick to writing uncontroversial articles and being an all-around "WikiGnome" but steer clear of the project namespace. Ironically, I've become less and less engaged here too, but mainly because my lack of proficiency in Vietnamese is making it harder to keep up with the increasing volumes of discussion.

For anything longer than a few words, Google Translate does a superb job of translating Vietnamese... into gibberish. Unfortunately, I don't think you can draw many conclusions from how it translates that project talk page.

 – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 11:19, ngày 28 tháng 10 năm 2012 (UTC)