First usability release is coming up soon.

Translate this post

Screenshot of enhanced toolbar
Screenshot of enhanced toolbar

I am happy to announce that the first set of usability improvements is scheduled to be integrated in MediaWiki and will be enabled as one of user preferences in Wikipedia in the first week of July. The nickname for this release is called Acai. The release names will follow the names of tropical fruits in alphabetical order. The description of features are found in this release page. The major improvements are; 1) reorganized tabs which clearly indicates the state of “Read” and “Edit”, 2) enhanced edit toolbar which is expandable based on users’ needs, 3) search result page which hides the clutter and make search results more visible, and etc. We are still combating with IE6 bugs , but come and play with the prototypes and let us know your feedback. On the localization front, we have introduced a set of new texts for localization. If you are a MediaWiki translator, your collaboration on localization is greatly appreciated as always.

Naoko Komura

Wikipedia Usability Initiative

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

Can you help us translate this article?

In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out?

3 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

This is good news. I’m looking forward to testing the new skin in a more “live” way.

My 2 cents: The tabs are nice and look great, go with it! The edit toolbar hiding is nice. I’m only unsure whether highlighting a word then clicking bold, and then highlighting the same word and clicking bold again, should remove the bolding, rather than adding the bolding twice. I have concerns about search results though, and wonder if they could be simplified further. Why does a non-technical user (or most users) care about this line: “12 KB (1833 words) – 02:50, 30 April 2009”? Perhaps this line could be removed? Also the space is not used very efficiently in… Read more »

Okay, that looks very, very nice. I love the new sidebar and tabs.