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I work at Wikia, which means I work with MediaWiki every day. I was kind of offended by how naive New is New is being. I don't think they have any grasp on the
by languagehacker 14y ago
I work at Wikia, which means I work with MediaWiki every day. I was kind of offended by how naive New is New is being. I don't think they have any grasp on the sort of massive scope changes like this would require. Wikipedia is not MediaWiki's only consumer. A lot of communities that use MediaWiki are extremely conservative about the UI, so some of the conservatism is by design. The WikiMedia Foundation is working on a lot of the more feasible features already, such as the visual editor.
I think it's obnoxious that a design team would spend two months on something without taking any time to consider implementation detail. The MediaWiki project is very transparent, and if New is New cared to learn about what features were in the works, they could have easily found them on the right wiki -- design mockups and all. Whoever would hire these guys to do work for hire will be paying for an intractable mess of a design with a hearty helping of scope creep.
And don't get me started on the proposed Wikipedia logo. It looks like the Wikia fractal with way less nodes.
- saraid216 14y ago> And don't get me started on the proposed Wikipedia logo. It looks like the Wikia fractal with way less nodes. I found it offensive that they felt the English 'W' was the only one worth featuring in the logo.
- mbrubeck 14y agoTo be fair, Wikipedia already uses a "W" as its favicon in every locale (even for languages with non-Latin scripts, like Japanese and Arabic): http://ja.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico http://ja.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico http://ar.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico http://ar.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoNew is New's idea is just to trash the well-recognisable wikipedia W, and replace it with a new one, with no good reason. And trash the icons for the various Wikimedia projects.
- jpadkins 14y agopeople who get paid for coming up with new icons and logo's are going to create new logos and icons.. it's what they do. Is there every a "reason" to create new logo's or icons? Other than someone feels a new for a new or fresh look...
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoWell, sometimes companies feel their current logo is too out of date and they want to change it. Or sometimes companies rebrand completely, sometimes because of a shift of focus. (A company I know about shifted from discrete software to B2B software and changed its branding in the process)
- chris_wot 14y agoA legitimate reason is when a company or organisation changes significantly. Wikipedia changes remarkably over time, but does it incrementally. Logo change is neither sensible or required.
- briandear 14y agoOffensive? Really? Having one's religion insulted is offensive. A "W" shouldn't be.
- saraid216 14y agoNah, not religion. Country. Language. Cultural identity.
- hkmurakami 14y agoI highly highly doubt that this is an actual appeal by them to change the MediaWiki interface. I see this purely as a publicity stunt / marketing move, intended to get their brand and abilities out there in front of people. And to be frank, I think they're being quite successful at that. UX/practicality aside, most of the components do look good. (though good parts of it remind me of Google, Quora, and other prominent sites) (Seeing this site reminded me of the guy who did the Windows redesign work a few months ago, which means that the windows redesign guy did a good job marketing/branding himself too!)
- fsniper 14y agoThey seem to be very effective and successful, until you see their incapability of grasping their advised Wiki logo's and Wordpress logos similarity. That's where they just fail.
- mieubrisse 14y ago> most of the components do look good. (though good parts of it remind me of Google, Quora, and other prominent sites) I got the exact same aesthetic feeling, too. This redesign reminded of nothing so much as GMail.
- rplnt 14y agoExactly. No content, just big buttons that aren't clear about what they do.
- snowwrestler 14y agoOne of the absolute biggest challenges in hiring a web design firm is getting them to understand the company and work within the real constraints of the business and budget. Pie-in-the-sky projects like this one don't demonstrate that the firm can do that.
- cmelbye 14y agoHeh, that's very funny coming from a Wikia employee. "Conservative" is the last word I'd ever use when describing Wikia's changes to the MediaWiki UI. You guys have no problem forking MediaWiki and making drastic changes to the codebase (http://svn.wikia-code.com/wikia/trunk/ http://svn.wikia-code.com/wikia/trunk/), so why can't the MediaWiki project make drastic changes of their own?
- languagehacker 14y agoWikia's code is indeed a fork of MediaWiki's. We're working on making it a less drastic fork. And we've always tried to make concessions with respect to the UI. For instance users can choose the Monobook skin in the preferences pane.
- drivingmenuts 14y agoI don't think they're proposing changes to Mediawiki, they're proposing changes to the look of Wikipedia. While they may be synonomous, one is the software, one is the organization that uses the software. Wikipedia could change the template for their version of the site, without affecting MW at all.
- neilk 14y agoHe's proposing to change it so it works like Etherpad. That would have to replace every single byte in storage and all the previous versions. Think about it.
- RandallBrown 14y agoWow, I had no idea that Wikia ran on MediaWiki. I have usually avoided wikia wikis because they always seemed harder to use than Wikipedia. Now that I look closer, I can see the similarities. What is the Wikia fractal?
- languagehacker 14y agohttp://community.wikia.com/wiki/File:New_fractal_logo.png http://community.wikia.com/wiki/File:New_fractal_logo.png