Type of activity: Pre-scheduled session
Main topic: Sustainable user experience (if my wild guess what this means is even accurate)
The problem
There are two problems here:
- Wikimedia wikis use the skin Vector, which does not have any Wikimedia branding, does not match new applications (oojs etc), and has no real style guide associated with it at all
- Third-party wikis ship with the same skin as Wikimedia projects by default, which often doesn't fully meet their needs (lack of mobile support, etc)
I've been working on a new skin intended to more closely match the default oojs theme and maintain and improve upon the Vector UX (Timeless, which is also based on Winter, which was created for experimenting with iterating on Vector). The question is, what problems does it need to solve? What do we need to maintain? Would this even solve the problems for Wikimedia projects?
And what about third-party projects? Would this be an appropriate skin to serve by default (with different theming/colours)? What are the problems that should be solved here? What do people even want?
Expected outcome
I'll have a better idea what to do with Timeless so everyone is happy and stuff. This is entirely selfish and I freely admit it.
Do note, though, that this will just be more of a developer-/wmf-/sysadmin-oriented discussion; direct discussions with the affected communities will also still be needed.
Current status of the discussion
There's a skin. There's been talk. I used it as a demo for a tech talk about skinning. Development and whatnot has kind of been on hold for the last while because I've been distracted by a pressing need to get money and not die of having no money, though.
I plan to put in a proposal for a project grant to fund work on following up on this, including more outreach to actual communities.