Hi everyone,

Thank you all for your ongoing feedback - it has helped us make the skin better for everyone! As we previously discussed, we are preparing for the deployment of the Vector 2022 skin to all logged-out desktop users of English Wikipedia and those logged-in desktop users of English Wikipedia who both are using Vector legacy and haven't chosen Vector legacy in their global preferences. The change will take place on January 18 around 14 15:00 UTC.

We want to make the transition smooth, avoid breaking workflows, and limit confusion and post-deployment issues. We're sharing some details and useful links below to explain how the transition will be performed.

1. This week and early next week, we'll make sure that the software version next week will be free from any easily noticeable imperfections.
2. This week and early next week, there will be banners incentivising logged-in users to switch to Vector 2022.
3. This week, we are also going to update affiliates such as WMCA, WMDC, WMNGA and WMUK.
4. Shortly after the deployment, logged-out and logged-in users will see banners informing them about the change.
5. As always, it will take at most three days for most of the cache to be updated. Before that, Vector legacy will load on some pages. After that, readers will see the new skin on any page.
6. Before and after the deployment, we will be hosting office hours. At those meetings, we will be answering questions on the skin itself, on updating any necessary gadgets and scripts, as well as receiving feedback on future improvements to the new skin. Please, feel free to join us at the following times:
   • Thursday, January 12, at 20:00 UTC - on Zoom click here to join / dial by your location
   • Thursday, January 19, at 20:00 UTC - on Discord, the Open Meetings voice channel
   • Friday, January 20, at 6:00 UTC - on Zoom click here to join / dial by your location

As a reminder, logged-in users can opt out at any time. Those of you using a non-default skin (Timeless, Monobook, etc) will not see any changes. If you'd like to customize the skin, here's a dedicated FAQ section.

Thank you again! OVasileva (WMF), SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 19:17, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@OVasileva (WMF) and SGrabarczuk (WMF): I missed your original update I think, but I just want to clarify with regards to icons in the sticky header: which changes were made? I see the update mentions tooltips, but I think tooltips were already there pre-RfC? Were any further changes made to these after the RfC was started? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 13:08, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hey @ProcrastinatingReader, thanks for your question! We did a couple of things after the RfC to improve the sticky header:

• Reviewed our original sticky header research on icon recognizability, specifically around the sticky header icons to confirm if there was sufficient understanding in what each icon leads to.  Users reported they were comfortable with most icons with the exception of beta features, preferences/gadgets, and contributions, all of which have labels within the user menu.
• Accessibility tested our tooltips in collaboration with the American Foundation for the Blind

• Worked on making the sticky header significantly more useful overall by adding a link to edit the page (which will be available in the deployment on Wednesday).  Our A/B test showed that using this new link made it more likely for people to complete the edits they start using the sticky header and that edits people initiated and published using the sticky header were less likely to be reverted.
• Prior to the RfC we also collaborated with the Editing team on improving the sticky header on talk pages, where the icon to add a new talk page topic also contains a label “Add topic” for clarity. (For details, see the #Talk page appearance section below.)

Does that answer your question? Did you have anything specific in mind which the answer above doesn't address? Thanks,

OVasileva (WMF) & SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:17, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Seems Gud...  :-) 60.241.201.38 (talk) 06:07, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sort of. Some of these seem to be pre-RfC, so I expect editors took these points and research into account when commenting with concerns. I'm wondering if anything specific has been changed or researched since that RfC, not including anything done or presented prior to that RfC starting. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 15:23, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@SGrabarczuk (WMF) I don't understand this phrase: "...and those logged-in desktop users of English Wikipedia who both are using Vector legacy and haven't chosen Vector legacy in their global preferences". I must be missing something, but how can someone be using Vector legacy if it's not chosen in global preferences? Can it be chosen in local preferences, maybe? (I'm not up on how all of the preferences work.) That phrase describes one group of users, right, who are "using but haven't chosen" vector legacy? Maybe I just need more coffee, but I am confused as to what this means. David10244 (talk) 10:51, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hey @David10244, thanks for this question. The preferences work the following way: when you go to the local preferences page, you'll see the default settings selected/activated for you. You may change them by selecting (choosing) anything different than the default. The global preferences are not active, though - by the default, there's no global skin selected. So in order to see the same skin across all the wikis, you need to activate it via the global preferences. Unless you do that, with each local change (such as the change of the skin here today), you'll experience this change. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 14:53, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

OK, that makes sense. Thanks. David10244 (talk) 08:20, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Could you make it less ugly and unusable? DS (talk) 04:28, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, this is not good, not good at all. I'm glad we're allowed to choose our own layout, but I worry about how long we'll be able to keep the Vector 2010 version. If I wanted Wikipedia to look like the mobile version I'd access it on my mobile device. It looks terrible on desktop. Criticalthinker (talk) 10:33, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Criticalthinker I expect Vector 2010 to remain available basically forever, just like MonoBook is still available in spite of being replaced by (now legacy) Vector as the default skin in 2010. Matma Rex talk 01:48, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a never-logged-in multiple times donator to the WMF and absolutely hate the change and the fact none of the preferences like widening the pages are saved as cookies. Until the new theme is either removed or allowed to be opted out for logged-out users I will not donate a single cent to wikipedia. 31.178.125.94 (talk) 14:09, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Same here. I preferred the high density of information. I even switch to desktop version on my phone if I'm settling in for a long read. 2601:645:0:41C0:D1A0:EB6A:A0C7:18BD (talk) 20:05, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Agree - the insistence on reducing information density at all costs is the absolute worst thing about 2010s web design. IWantTheOldInterfaceBack (talk) 20:12, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, the amount of empty space is unbearable 79.153.18.127 (talk) 11:55, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The new skin is horrible. Tried reading a longish aricle last evening and had to stop after 5 minutes because I got severe eyestrain due to the very narrow text and way too much white space. It has effectively made wikipedia unsuable for me and as a result I will no longer be donating to the foundation unless you provide an option for users to switch back to the old theme. Thank you and have a good day. 82.78.21.194 (talk) 13:26, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The new skin is really horrible on so many dimensions, and while I understand the reasons why some editors and specialized users appreciate vector 2022, the fundamental flaw in the rollout was making it the default without an easy, straightforward and persistent way to opt-out without forcing people to log-in against their will. Many of the "features" (and in my view huge drawbacks) of the new skin appeal to editors who are usually logged in and can thus easily pick their own skin. But the essentially obligatory default decision for rest of us should be based on a poll of those people who don't log in (and are overwhelmingly non-editors) given that the preferences of editors don't fairly represent the much larger non-editor reader community who are the ones negatively impacted by the non-logged in default. And until then, please undo those horrible forced changes until it's possible to straightforwardly and persistently opt out of the new skin WITHOUT FORCING READERS TO LOG-IN! 2601:14A:502:460:8899:6053:6A84:4191 (talk) 18:36, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry that a part of the intensity of the blowback is probably from other recent and current high-handedness issues with WMF and loss of perspective by them. But you showed a bit of that when, regarding feedback you led with / emphasized going by feedback derived from elsewhere and your interpretation of it. And I understand it takes some cleverness / can be challenging to get useful feedback from crowds. At this point I think that it would be good to derive feedback on specific items from the discussions HERE regarding things to change with the new format. And be guided by and acknowledge that feedback, especially where the changes are doable. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 18:37, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

But you showed a bit of that when, regarding feedback you led with / emphasized going by feedback derived from elsewhere and your interpretation of it. And I understand it takes some cleverness / can be challenging to get useful feedback from crowds

I want to echo what North8000 has said here. If I have learned anything in my education in public health and messaging, it is that the #1 quality you need to convince a lot of people that something is good for them is their trust. And that should have been at the forefront of your mind when deciding how, if at all, to implement this drastic of a change. All the t's should have been crossed and i's dotted, given the sentiment wrt the WMF on en.wiki. It should have been done as slowly as possible. Incorporate RFC#1 feedback, propose revised Vector 2022, create second RFC. Re-tool, and eventually implement Vector 2023.

As they say, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. This was neither. — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 18:43, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

So. That notice at the top of my pages here...

The one that says

Try out the new interface improvements

Search, language switching, sticky toolbar, table of contents, and more

I have my editing all fixed-up the way I like it, so I have some questions about these changes (or "improvements"). I don't want anything about my editing to change and I don't know if I even have a choice, I just keep my head down and edit stuff around here. So do I have a choice? Is it possible to disable these "improvements" and keep editing tools/style/appearance the same as they presently are? And if editors 'can disable these upcoming changes, how do we do that? Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 16:24, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Shearonink This should be in reference to mw:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements.

How to avoid this change: From reading the above, you should be able to opt out of this by setting your global skin preference to "Vector legacy (2010)" and ensuring that you do not have a "local exception on this wiki". This should mean that when the default changes, your skin will not (That is if I understand correctly). Terasail^[✉️] 16:50, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your answer. Shearonink (talk) 17:16, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) @Shearonink, you will be able to change it at Special:Preferences. See #Vector 2022 deployment update. — Qwerfjkltalk 16:52, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your answer. Shearonink (talk) 17:16, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Shearonink - thanks for your question and for trying out the new interface! Have you tried out the new skin for a couple of days? We've noticed that it can take a few days for folks to get used to the new skin and the new locations of the features. That said, you can disable it at any time. There's two ways to do this - the first is the link in the left sidebar that says "Switch to old look" and the second is from the appearance section of your preferences as mentioned above. OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 16:52, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Lol, well, actually, no I haven't tried it out, I really don't want to. Oh I know it's wonderful and whatever but what I have now *works* fine for me. And I'm going to keep it. Shearonink (talk) 17:16, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

And, strictly speaking, the editing itself shouldn't be impacted, really. All editing tools work pretty much the same way on any skin. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 17:08, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Good to hear. When the appearance of the editing window changes I find that confusing and off-putting. I like to know where things are and am an editing creature of habit. Shearonink (talk) 17:16, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A side question: how is this banner scheduled to pop up? Is it still going to appear after the skin is deployed? There is no way to disable this banner in the preferences. I didn't want to adblock these banners, because I would hope they are supposed to be for important announcements. But now I am seeing it 4th time already despite having dismissed it. And I have toggled to the skin and back before and I have set my preferences - why does it still show up for me at all? Where is the "don't show again" option? —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 20:02, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps when this goes live we put up a WLN as well. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:09, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hey @Hellknowz. Thanks for this comment. Sorry for making this a bit too annoying. I've decreased the number of times the banner appears from four to three. In many cases, it's five, for example in the case of the Community Wishlist Survey or the Wikimania scholarships season. (But for the call for nominations in the steward elections, it would be three.)

These banners will not appear after the skin is deployed. We will run different banners with a different target link. Those would appear three times per user at most, I think.

I aim at some balance between making sure many people know and not pushing too much. I hope I'm close :) SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 22:28, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well, adblock it is then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 12:01, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Hellknowz: That shouldn't be necessary. It's a WP:CENTRALNOTICE, so it's not difficult to write a CSS rule to hide it:

div#DesktopImprovements_suggestion_its_coming { display: none !important; }

For English Wikipedia only, put it in Special:MyPage/common.css; for all WMF sites, put it in m:Special:MyPage/global.css. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:05, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Redrose64: Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, the reply said "We will run different banners with a different target link" and didn't address being able to switch these off, so that won't help when something else pops up again later. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 10:49, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

New Interface

Hi, So I decided to click the "New Interface" banner and now I regret it, Hate the new interface - it looks like the mobile version but just with more features, Is there anyway I can undo this new interface malarky ?, Thanks –Davey2010^Talk 02:16, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Took me a while but eventually found it out, I don't know why anyone thought moving the Watchlist and Contribs to the "account" icon was a fantastic idea as it wasn't. My huge dislike is the reduced page size - I don't know why things couldn't stay relatively the same as now but just upgraded but then again Facebook, Twitter and YouTube like to "improve" their designs too and ironically I never liked those redesigns either but I live with it, .Anyway not for me I'm afraid. –Davey2010^Talk 02:31, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There is a toggle width button in the right lower corner of your screen and you can change it in preferences. That way you have the new skin but the same width. Coldbolt (talk) 10:38, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There is a toggle width button in the right lower corner of your screen There is not. The sidebar is ridiculously wide ... - David Gerard (talk) 16:40, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The fact that the banner changes your skin if you click on it anywhere, but the ability to change it back is obscured by that very skin, underlines that the core feature of Scalar 2022 is coercion. It is an attempt to take away the reader's control over key aspects of their experience in favour of what the WMF have internally decided is best for them, especially article width, forcing the user into a linear reading experience. All this serves to do is to assert the primacy of corporate identity and power over freedom and respect for the user. This isn't anything new though: the aesthetics of power and linearisation have been festering in social media app design for years (recently reaching a new height of evil in things like instagram stories) but it's sad that it's finally infecting Wikipedia. –small jars tc 11:13, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The most similar case might be the old vs. new Reddit interface. I have the browser extension that auto-redirects to the old version, of course, but things are predictably starting to break and not get fixed over time (most egregiously and recently in the form of random backslashes appearing in some pasted URLs). Sooner or later, this will also happen to Vector 2010. And that's not even touching on the trend of platforms deliberately wrecking their mobile websites to goad users into using the official apps instead, which make for a much more convenient data collection and shoving-ads-down-one's-throat environment. Of course, you do need a somewhat serviceable app for that, so it probably can't become a thing for Wikipedia for at least another decade or so... Dr. Duh 🩺 (talk) 13:16, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well I'm using MonoBook right now without any problems, so I don't think Vector proper is ever going to stop working. The problem is that most readers have no idea that there is a way to change the skin, and the page width toggle is worthless for logged out users because it resets every time you move to a new page. If that was fixed (and it could be with session storage and common.js) I would be a little bit happier, but Scalar gets in the way of readers' control over their experience in a bunch of other ways, and editors are going to have to do a lot of work reformatting articles so they don’t look terrible in the new skin.–small jars tc 14:42, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I hope that this high-priority bug that is tracked at Phabricator since 13 November will be fixed before 18 January 15:00 UTC. --NGC 54 (talk｜contribs) 15:11, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @NGC 54 - Thank you for bringing this up! We've been keeping a close eye on this issue as well. The bug itself is not within the Mediawiki software but is an upstream bug in Chromium browsers (affecting browsers such as Chrome , Opera, and other Chromium-based browsers). We have reached out to the Chromium team who were able to put up a couple of patches to fix the issue late last week. Progress can be tracked here. OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 15:32, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Opinion of a reader on this design change

Hello, I just read the RfC about (way too late unfortunately). I'm French and a reader. Today I feel frustrated, not listened and betrayed by the WMF. I've been trying to voice my opinion on the Vector 2022 ever since it was forced on the French Wikipedia. I'm normally a logged-out user. Here is what I have to say, I HATE IT. I deeply feel it's one of the dumbest changes of design I've ever seen. I created an account specifically to disable that disaster when it landed on the French Wikipedia. I still remember on the French Wikipedia how there was a lot of new account that just came to know how to disable or remove it. NO ONE LIKED IT or understood why it was forced on them, but the WMF is still pushing for it, not listening, no matter what. I voiced my opinion a number of time on the discussion page, but the WMF team NEVER listen to any of the negative criticism they were given. Each time someone tried to voice a negative opinion, someone from came gave as an answer "Have read this study and our blog that explain why did that?" (yes we did thank you, and we are still not convinced) and right after that we were ignored. Since then, I have lost any trust I had in the WMF to manage Wikipedia properly. And honestly, I have the feeling some higher up at the WMF is forcing this design on everyone else and everyone is afraid to say them no. Just look at the strategy they used to push the design, first targeting a non-English-speaking Wikipedia, so people can't complain but big enough to get feedback from the few English speakers who liked it and ignoring negative feed back (like mine). Then extending to other smaller non-English-speaking Wikipedias using the same strategy, then hitting small WMF services that barely anyone uses. See how the purposefully got around their biggest Wikipedia? Now they can push this disaster on it telling you "But look a majority of the other Wikipedia use it and are happy. Sorry, but the majority has spoken." And you'll see as much as in the discussion page all negative comments will be ignored, they will impose this on the English Wikipedia as they did to the French. DerpFox (talk) 23:50, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hello! This page exists for people to get technical help with Wikipedia. The technical workaround for your problem, for you, is to switch to a different skin in your Preferences. It sounds like you are upset with the process; I think a page like Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF) might be a better place to address those concerns. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:30, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. The page you are pointing me to say to come here to talk about that subject. I know I'm not really in the right place. But there don't seem to be a right place for that anywhere I look, every time I posted somewhere I've been told "no this is not the place go look at *other page name*". The WMF have made it really difficult if not impossible to voice a negative option about that new design they are forcing on every one and the way they are operating that change. DerpFox (talk) 01:57, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The WMF is hell-bent on imposing Vector 2022 and will never listen to the community on this one. The best we can do is change skins. For logged-in registered editors, this is an easy preference change, at least for now. When logged out, I intend to use User:Alexis Jazz/SkinEnforcer. Certes (talk) 12:00, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed. Having just checked it again, I have to say I totally don't get why they changed the old "menus at top and to the left, title plus article on remainder" to "menus at top and to the left, then a title, then a new line of menu items (underlined to make it look like a subtitle), and then the remainder of the article". It's a completely counterintuitive layout. Fram (talk) 15:28, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is on purpose?? I was trying to figure out where to report that it's giving me the mobile site. The new design is absolutely terrible. Thanks to Jonesey95 for pointing out the expand button in the lower right, which fixes most the problem, and is extremely easy to miss on a 4k monitor.

As a logged-out user, I shouldn't have to install some kind of script in order to have a readable site. I expect designs like this from social media apps that show contempt for anyone in a desktop browser, but not from Wikipedia. To reiterate: the new design is so bad I thought it was a bug. 2600:8800:619D:1200:1154:5DC4:1C57:4C8C (talk) 16:37, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose, I really dislike this Vector variant ever since they introduced in my local-language wiki. It wastes lots of space on the side which should have been something useful (i.e. article text) or having some readily-accessible navigation there (like languages, permalinks, etc). Now various things only have cute "icons" and require click to actually see what the darn thing was, like how the dreaded social-control media sites are designed these days. And since these navigation elements are image now, have you ever tried to log in with images disabled? (I disable images a lot when I'm on GPRS connection with 6 KiB/sec download billed by megabyte, and Wikipedia had always been one of the sites usable in that condition)

I suspect you people at WMF haven't: you can't log in in that condition. (Spoiler: you will also have to disable CSS to see the login link, or you will have to enter the URL of Special:Login page manually)

At various points in beta-test (which I have not ever willing to participate), Vector 202x even killed navigability on my not-so-modern browser that I run without JS: language button died completely, user menu on the top went duds (prevented me from logging in to "opt-out"), left pane (when opened) end up pushing the article down into oblivion. The last one (including no-image bug above) still happen in this "iteration".

Also, my use of Wikipedia was 99.5% done in anonymous fashion; I'm not even given a choice to opt out in these cases, and had to manually append "?useskin=vector" (or "&useskin=vector") to the URL every single page load like a pleb because the damn thing doesn't record this preference in cookie when the session is not a logged-in one.

Overall, this is basically the same thing as shoehorning mobile web into desktop; and I condemn WMF for this.

Where did people vote to not have this Vector-202x as default again?

— :Nvtj (talk) 16:50, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Nvtj: There wasn't a vote. There was a discussion at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Deployment of Vector (2022). More people opposed implementation than supported it, but it was closed with a consensus in support of implementation anyway. Elli (talk | contribs) 22:17, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

...Are you serious? The majority voted not to implement the new design, but you guys did it anyways? The old design was perfectly fine - there was no need whatsoever to change it (especially since no one was complaining about it, maybe except for you powerful few who had the ability to change it), and you should listen to the people who really don't like the new design. As an anon, I especially don't like the fact that the only way to change it back... (bar an extension or script that would almost certainly break) ...is to register an account. Yes, very clever, you implemented a new design that most people are opposed to just so you can get thousands of new people to register. Tell me, does it actually expend too many resources to allow anons to toggle on and off the new design? You could still cache the page and implement the reversion clientside afterwards - Nothing seems to have been added or removed since the update, just switched around, maybe except for the little button that toggles full width on and off. On that topic, why is full width not the default? Why do anons have to toggle full width on every time they click to a new article/page?

Hold a public vote seeing who's for and against the new design. 2600:1700:2DA1:C20F:6E8A:2A76:FFE0:6DEA (talk) 07:44, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This won't happen because the people who could hold that vote already wanted the new skin and wouldn't want to face potential dissent. The most we can hope for is that the legacy skin is not rendered broken from lack of maintenance or outright removed. Vector2022IsAbsolutelyTerrible (talk) 18:39, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The sheer volume of vitriolic opposition to this, the sentiment that people would rather spend money elsewhere if this is what wikipedia does with their donations, people asking for alternative options -- you would really think such a highly literate group of people would be able to see the writing on the wall. AtomicFi (talk) 19:35, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Going live and opting out

It seems from the above discussion that the new skin may go live on 18 January at 15:00. Is that the case? Whenever it happens, many (perhaps most) editors and readers will want to opt out of this change. Should we be more proactive in informing them of why Wikipedia looks different and how they can reverse the change if they wish? I think this needs at least a watchlist notice and possibly even a banner on the main page for the benefit of unregistered readers who have no watchlist. Certes (talk) 15:26, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Certes we're getting a WLN up on this. Readers won't be able to opt-out. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:31, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Readers won't be able to opt-out officially, but DerpFox's comments above suggest that publicity for tools such as User:Alexis Jazz/SkinEnforcer would be very helpful. It might reduce the loss of readers to forks and mirrors which continue to use their preferred skin. Certes (talk) 19:37, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What's the justification for this? No reliable way to store user preferences? Seems pretty weak if you ask me. Tentonne (talk) 23:30, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The justification is that they wanted the change and ignored user and editor input that in any way opposed their goal.

Or the goal was to create a larger number of users with accounts, by irritating them into signing up.

I'm leaning toward "someone important liked this" and then unilaterally decided. Just look at the non-answers on the discussion page for vector 2022. All of the "Opposes" are just thanked for their opinion or they receive the same explanation as everyone else, regardless of the actual content of the issue they had with the design. It's bizarre. AtomicFi (talk) 19:40, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Certes - Thanks for your question! For logged-out users, we will also be putting banners up with more information on the change on the day of deployment. OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 15:34, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Images and infoboxes competing for space

I'm not sure where to ask this question, perhaps if there's already a discussion, some more knowledgeable editor can link it for me here. Obviously Vector 2022 removes the table of contents from within the prose between the introduction and the first section, and this has a noticeable side effect which, similar to hiding the TOC on Vector legacy, brings the first section up, often to left of the infobox. Apparently over 3.1 million English language articles have an infobox. Many of these infoboxes are long, too long in my opinion, but that's another discussion. The end result however is, even when the "limited content width" box in the lower right is toggled on, that any images in the first section, say "History" or similar, get stacked up down the page, further and further away from their relevant prose. I work on several U.S. state articles, I'll point to Maryland, one I don't work on, as an example of this.

Help:Pictures#Avoiding stack-ups still advises me that stacking is a "problem" and gives several solutions to avoid it. I know users at WP:GAN or WP:FAC will frequently ding articles for this issue. Is stacking at the start of articles just an accepted byproduct, now that Vector 2022 will be the default? On my articles, should I do anything? Like should I avoid early images in the first sections? Should I use right-aligned tables to sit them next to infoboxes? Is there some new code coming to reduce the impact of long infoboxes? Or is all of this a moot point because desktop web browsing is dying and we should focus on how a page appears on mobile? Help, I'm very unsure here!-- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 15:49, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Patrickneil: Two things: On Year in xxxCountry" lists - usually with very long vertical TOC, I've changed TOC to {{horizontal TOC|nonum=yes|align=center}}. This results in the beginning content much higher on the display, even with very long right-side infobox. With that horizontal TOC there can be limit 2 or 3 to condense the TOC even more. A while back I switched (under Preferences/Appearance) to MonoBook Skin, and have not looked back to either Vector. There seem to be zero problems with MonoBook & it's quick. Second, for Avoiding stack-ups, I've seen some articles with Gallery at bottom of that section, to place 3, or 4 or 5 smaller bio images. An example is here. Also, using "right" parameter for a single image to keep the picture floating within a specific content section may be helpful. JoeNMLC (talk) 16:49, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I raised stacking/sandwiching early on as a potential issue with removing the table of contents, and @Blaze Wolf/@Styyx raised it again during the RfC here. As far as I can tell, the developers have not weighed in.

This leaves us with basically two options. We can either decide that some sandwiching in the first section is tolerable and we can align images there to the left, or we can embark on a massive campaign to remove them. I lean toward the first option, even given that we're now working with a narrower default width, since I've never seen sandwiching as the greatest evil, and the thought of losing thousands of good images (the first section is often History, with cool historical photos) just because of this is too much to bear. I'll ping @SandyGeorgia for your thoughts, as I know sandwiching is something that comes up all the time in your FAC/FAR work. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 16:50, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Was basically ignored because the example we gave also had a very small sandwich on the old skin, completely missing the point of the complaint. ~Styyx^Talk? 16:53, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sdkb A third option is to limit the (now miserably ridiculous) length of infoboxes, as that would eliminate most of the first section sandwich issues. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:40, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe also reconsider if anyone really benefits from having a huge list of ‘state symbols’ at such a prominent spot in an article like Maryland, pushing stuff even further down. This boyscout-level collecting of meaningless symbols, is something that few outside a subset of the USA will truly care about or need to know. ;) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:31, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Sdkb et al, glad to know that at least this was pointed out earlier. I agree that for my personal browsing, I'm unlikely to stick with Vector 2022, but I feel like I need to know how articles might display to the general public, given that the majority of their readers won't be logged in or have a vintage skin selected. I know, for example, I've been making an effort to ensure my SVGs have transparent backgrounds and colors that also work on the Wikipedia app's dark mode for Android and iOS. But after staring at this skin all day, I can't help but think that, gee, there's this big block of wasted white space on the right side of the page. The TOC and/or Wikipedia menu takes up this block on the left side, but the symmetrical space on the right is empty. So I have to ask, has anyone suggested filling that space with the page's infobox? Again, there's 6.6 million articles, and 3.1 million of them have infoboxes. Below the infobox, it can just be white space, as it is on Vector 2022 now anyways. I made myself a little animation, since I can unsee this missed opportunity now. And yep, TheDJ, I am well aware of the utter trivial-ness of that Template:Infobox U.S. state symbols, it survived a merge attempt in 2020, but if anyone was to bring it to TfD, I would surely support that!-- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 02:05, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Moving infoboxes to the right is non-trivial since infoboxes are an editor construct today and not a construct that the system knows about. There have been prototypes in the past that play with this positioning like mw:Winter, and I think today the responsive content gadget does some playing with some of the other elements that naturally float inline with the content on a wide resolution.

Moreover, WMF is working on "Page Tools" moving to the right hand column, see mw:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements/Features/Page tools. Of course this doesn't preclude having an infobox there in some way.

And ultimately, we would still have the problem of decreasing resolutions which would need to allow for the infobox being inline with the content or having some other way to 'dismiss' the infobox. Izno (talk) 02:40, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely, I hear you about how tighter resolutions would bring the infobox into the prose anyways. Perhaps, like the app though, it could collapse the infobox in line after the first paragraph on narrow resolutions. I do think though that something with this omnipresence on Wikipedia should get considered in the sites future functionality, and not just be left as an "editor construct". But that's interesting about the tools, I'm certainly learning a lot about this process now, thanks!-- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 03:18, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have turned off the "show me tons of white space" option in Preferences and adjusted my own common.css to make pages display better. If there is a massive outcry about the WMF imposing all of this white space on readers and editors, perhaps we could set our default site CSS to make page content use more space. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:26, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Visited link color

I switched over to the the new Vector for a few days. Overall, I can adjust to just about everything with it, save one thing. The shade of purple used for visited links just seems too... soft... for lack of a better word. I'd like to switch back to the darker color used in the legacy Vector. I know I could add some custom CSS to switch the color. Can someone help me out? Imzadi 1979 → 20:39, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Patafisik (WMF), I believe French Wikipedians have this documented somewhere in the archive of their Bistro. Could you find this? Thank you! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 22:06, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This seems to be what is calculated, you can replace the color value with whatever you want:

a:visited {
  color: #795cb2;
}

— xaosflux ^Talk 22:13, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What is the color of a visited link under the legacy Vector skin? Imzadi 1979 → 01:00, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Imzadi1979 it seems to be #0b0080 — xaosflux ^Talk 01:02, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! Imzadi 1979 → 01:14, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Are there CS attributes for visited interwiki and external links as well? I'm getting the new purple in those cases instead of the older #0b0080. Imzadi 1979 → 23:56, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There is a closed task phab:T213778 which implemented the change but has had meaningful discussion since implementation was done that I think the team should readdress, potentially with a new task. I would guess that Femke would have some amount to say. Izno (talk) 02:34, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Xaosflux:, the discussion on the French Wikipedia with the custom CSS is here. For further information about colors see also this explanation and this answer of AHollande (WMF).--Patafisik (WMF) (talk) 10:42, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I found both link colors to be unreadably light, despite them apparently passing contrast tests. I added these customized colors to my common.css file, which worked for me:

a {
    color: #0645ad
}
a:visited {
    color: #58219a;

The colors came from me testing colors on a color wheel until they felt right, not from any scientific or precedent-based process. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:28, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

My unscientific analysis of accessibility issues (using data that may under- or overestimate this easily by a factor of 2), indicated that almost a quarter of people had some accessibility issue with the new colours, which is likely less than the old colours. There is a follow-up discussion on the phab on my talk.

I still hope a further iteration is done, as it should be feasible to at least make the link colours distinguishable for colourblind people. I think that – rather than trying to solve this ourselves – we should look for precedents and ask WebAIM if they have example colours that work. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 17:22, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm appreciative of the intent behind the new colors, but they're just too light. I applied the CSS above to Wikisource, which fixed a problem where new shade of purple for visited links just didn't stand out very well from the page status backgrounds on a page like Index:America's Highways 1776–1976.djvu. Imzadi 1979 → 23:59, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The switch

It's now 15:00 UTC on January 18. As we can see the new Vector is being deployed on some pages after clicking links but mostly the old Vector styles still persists. Thingofme (talk) 15:54, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There was apparently a minor delay of 30 mins or so? And it gives an hour window for changes to even start appearing. Special:Diff/1134415805 Terasail^[✉️] 15:57, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There are problems here – I have manually switched back to Vector 2010 twice in my preferences (which FTR I strongly prefer, starting with the left-sidebar being far too wide (and not adjustable AFAICT) in Vector 2022), but pages keep defaulting back to 2022 layout against my fill. Please FIX THIS. I don't want to be forced to use Vector 2022. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 16:01, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Same for me.

Articles are always displayed in Vector 2010 but talk-pages and project-pages revert to Vector 2022 at random. A couple of refreshes bring back V2010 but another additional refresh can revert to V2022. So, strange. How does these flaws make into live?! TrangaBellam (talk) 16:06, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@IJBall: Came here to complain about that. According to the WMF staffer's post above, we have to change it back in our global preferences, otherwise the new skin will just override it again. If someone could explain to me why they have decided to make the local preferences unresponsive, I would be grateful. —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 16:06, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Also pinging TrangaBellam —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 16:07, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have manually reset twice – it still does what User:TrangaBellam is referring to – randomly switching back and forth between 2022 and 2010. And, FTR, clearing my browser cache does not help. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 16:08, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There are random switches, sometimes a page is shown Vector 2022 but sometimes the legacy styles were shown when I visit a page. Thingofme (talk) 16:13, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Thingofme Clear your page cache for any page showing the wrong skin? Hit Ctl+F5 to cold reload the page (On windows) This might help? Terasail^[✉️] 16:14, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

When I purged the cache the style immediately changed to Vector 2022 but after coming back again it reverts back to Vector 2010. Thingofme (talk) 16:17, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Vector 2022#What to expect on January 18th, 2023 Does state the change will "taking effect" until 16:30UTC, so should probably just wait the 20 mins to see if it calms down after then (hopefully) before ringing any alarm bells. Terasail^[✉️] 16:20, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@IJBall and Thingofme: Like I said, you have to do in your global preferences. When you go into your preferences, you have to scroll down to the manage global preferences link, then change your appearance over there. See the screenshot. —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 16:20, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

OK, that is seeming to work – thanks for the detailed explanation of doing it in Global settings Compassionate727!!

P.S. I wish they made it as easy to embed images in talk page discussion as you've done here... --IJBall (contribs • talk) 16:25, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@IJBall - thank you for raising this and apologies for this situation. Since we are currently rolling out in stages in order to minimize server load, we are updating the skin default in four stages, which is affecting local preferences. Local preferences will work once as expected once again once the deployment is completed, in about 20 minutes. OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 16:18, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

OMG, how do I get my old display back? This is awful. It's like looking at the mobile version of the website. The menus at the top of the page are so tiny and sometimes they disappear completely. And there is all of this white space, there is actually less room for the content of the page. It doesn't make the page more readable but less readable. This website is all about the content, not having 30+% of the page be white space. And the links on the left-hand side are sometimes replaced by a table of contents. Is there an alternative to this view? I don't remember ever "choosing" this display. Help! Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 16:38, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Once I found the Preferences link (which you have to hunt for), I was able to change my Display to Vector Legacy which resolved the problems with these new changes. I can't see, in any way, how these changes are an improvement. Some options you need, like an upper menu, are too small. The options/content you need is less visible and options you don't need are more prominent. I am just so grateful that there is the ability to go back to the more functional older version of the display. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 17:04, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Liz, under "skins" in Special:Preferences / Special:GlobalPreferences. — Qwerfjkltalk 17:07, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Liz:: OMG, how do I get my old display back? This is awful. I couldn't agree with you more. I get that maybe I don't follow things closely enough. I probably missed the super-obvious notification, I guess? I had no goddamn idea what was going on, or why the page rendered so weird. I thought the same "Did I follow a mobile link?".

This website is all about the content, not having 30+% of the page be white space. I couldn't have said it better.

Once I found the Preferences link (which you have to hunt for), I was able to change my Display to Vector Legacy which resolved the problems with these new changes. Same. Took me a moment to figure out what was going on, and where I needed to go to undo the changes that were selected for me without my input.

Could we please, PLEASE not force stuff like this on established users ever again, WMF? SQL^{Query Me!} 01:10, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Why??

Why on earth was this unilaterally imposed on the community as the default after all?? An RFC was held to gauge the support to make this new skin the default and it ended with nothing close to a consensus in favor of Vector 2022, yet you just go ahead and ignore it and impose this on a community that clearly doesn't want it?? And what's worst is that none of the issued raised during the RFC have been addressed in any way. This is one of the worst cases of ignoring your community I have witnessed in the history of Wikipedia. Please roll back the switch of default as soon as possible.Tvx1 16:48, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If this is the worst case of ignoring the community that you've seen, you've lived a gilded wiki-life. See WP:FRAMGATE as an example. Anyway, if you've been ported to the new Vector and you want to switch back, there's a bolded link in the left sidebar that will take you right to the setting in your preferences. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 17:07, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Ivanvector: agreed this isn't the worst WMF action ever but it's certainly not the best. Has there already been a well-attended discussion about whether this should be made opt-in rather than opt-out on WP? VQuakr (talk) 17:32, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@VQuakr, the RfC linked above. — Qwerfjkltalk 19:14, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Qwerfjkl: there clearly isn't consensus there to roll this out as default on WP. Is mousewheel scrolling in the skin broken for anyone else or is that just me? VQuakr (talk) 19:26, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@VQuakr, just you. On the other hand, there clearly isn't consensus not to roll this out. — Qwerfjkltalk 20:11, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Qwerfjkl: hopefully you're joking. I've given more detail on the mousewheel thing at WT:Vector 2022. VQuakr (talk) 20:16, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@VQuakr, hardly. From the closure of the RfC:
If all the concerns outlined above are satisfactorily addressed then we see community support to roll out the change, and in our view no further RfC would be required, although the Web team is free to hold one if they wish. The concerns were addressed through the page width toggle and changes to the ToC. — Qwerfjkltalk 20:26, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

they likely aren't addressed though. Transcleanupgal (talk) 23:58, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

They addressed none of the suggested changes, so far as I can see. AtomicFi (talk) 19:42, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. Reeks of the WMF becoming detached from WP's userbase. The fact that non-signed in users (e.g. non-editors, e.g. the entire point of this website's existence) can't opt out, period, is REALLY over-the-top obstructiveness. If it was a simple toggle and not a self-congratulatory Corporate Memphis banner explaining nothing, there would be no issue. Lucksash (talk) 20:37, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

agree as well, this is awful decision, but I expect that this will be brushed as a few vocal oponents voicing their negative opinions and no revert or any button/switch/ability to change skin to more appropriate desktop interface will come. IJustCreatedAccountBecauseOfThis1diocy (talk) 14:10, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Why is the "log in" button hidden?

I'm looking at the main page now while logged out and it's popping up Vector2022. There's a plainly visible "create account button", but I have to click through an elipsis to find the link to actually log in. If I click on "create account", I'm taken to Special:CreateAccount, but that page also has the link to actually log in to an existing account hidden behind a menu. This seems like a glaring usability issue for those with more limited computer skills, since they can't ctrl+f "log" anymore to find the link to log in. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 17:44, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Red-tailed hawk see below, would that have helped you? — xaosflux ^Talk 21:29, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It would be better than the current situation, yes. But it would still be less user-friendly than having text that says "log in" to the left of the text that says "create account". The contributions page and the talk page are a bit less important and can be safely hidden; logged out people get a giant orange warning when they have a new talk message, and there aren't really communication issues that would result from not being able to directly access one's contributions. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 21:35, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Red-tailed hawk, thank you for your comment. We'll definitely discuss this. The reason for this change is because a lot of potential future editors were not aware they could create an account. We wanted to direct their attention to the account creation workflow. The reason we collapsed the logged-in link is because people rarely log out, so it's an action that is not taken too often. We'll look at the data. If logins go down, that will be the strongest argument. But we'll try to explore different solutions anyway. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:18, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Red-tailed hawk, @Xaosflux - thanks for the conversation on this. Just wanted to follow-up from office hours that we've flagged this as a potential concern with the team and will review the data early next week. We'll update with some ideas next week or the week after. OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 17:43, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Three dots does not tell me that's where login is hiding

I mean, I guessed, because that's where the button used to be, but it's not intuitive, and I thought the idea was for Vector 2022 to be friendlier to new people. Red Fiona (talk) 21:02, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Redfiona99 Would expanding on the tool tip help? It currently says "More options" (via MediaWiki:Tooltip-vector-anon-user-menu-title). Perhaps "Log in and more options"? — xaosflux ^Talk 21:21, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think so (I've been having to talk my Mum through working with her new phone so I have had "that is not obvious" drummed into me this week). Red Fiona (talk) 21:23, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Will leave this open for a bit, we should first have a showing of support for it (or at least lack of objection after a reasonable time). — xaosflux ^Talk 21:25, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I like this idea. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:26, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Absent anything else, this will be an improvement over the current state. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 00:54, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Similarly, I'd also support @Red-tailed hawk's suggestion of havng a "log in" button next to "create account". Red Fiona (talk) 00:41, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Still not obvious: if the idea is to be friendlier to new people, do they even know what tooltips are, much less to seek them out? I don't know if my mom does. Can we assume they're in the habit of clicking or mouseovering symbols on the screen to see what those do? No. Just put the "log in" button nex to the "create account" button instead of actively making this part of the UI worse for all current and future users. --Kizor 09:58, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Kizor that's not something we can easily fix here on the English Wikipedia, the upstream skin team will need to consider it. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:00, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There is currently a discussion at MediaWiki talk:Createacct-username-help regarding whether or not to add a link to the login page atop the Special:CreateAccount page. The thread is Proposal: add a link to log into an existing account.. Thank you. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 16:24, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: I've updated the tooltip to say "Log in and more options" so now the three dots do tell you that log in is in there. I don't love this as a final state, but don't see any downsides as an intermediary step. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:48, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The problem with sites being made "friendlier" is that they are designed by--thus friendly for--geeks and troglodytes whose lives are at their keyboards (I'll leave out the "Mom's basement" stereotype). THEY know where these things are hidden. What? There are people whose lives revolve around something other than computers? After a long history of being misfits, they are suddenly on a power trip, running things. They're deciding for us what we want--and they might or might not let us know. So they'll give us what they know we want--from the absolutely basic functions (like "on" or "off") being hidden behind an ellipsis to who we "want" to be the next President of the United States. Uporządnicki (talk) 13:59, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How do you sign in?

I'd better never get signed out. There's no place to sign in. People need to be shown an easy way to do it.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:36, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Vchimpanzee the log in control is under the "..." button in the top right corner (the tool tip should say that as well). It will send you to Special:UserLogin to log in. A feature request to put the button back is open under phab:T289212 — xaosflux ^Talk 16:55, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

And the Phabricator people don't seem interested to act on the request. Different approach required. Tvx1 17:03, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Being a "keyboard" person, on the "Logged out" screen, I just do Alt+⇧ Shift+o (that's a lower-case letter o) to sign in. JoeNMLC (talk) 17:15, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Doesn’t work on my computer… Tvx1 22:39, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Just tried on an incognito window and the key combination works for me (as it is described on the tooltip upon hover). The combination might be overriden by something else on your browser? —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 00:53, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Or maybe this operating system-specific. On a hunch I restarded my dual-OS computer in Windows and in that system it does work. But far from everyone uses Windows, so it's not something we can rely on. Tvx1 20:34, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If it's Apple it's probably something along the lines of ⌘ Cmd+⇧ Shift+O. The tooltip on hover usually gives the appropriate hotkey combination. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 20:46, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The hotkeys are set by your web browser. See Wikipedia:Keyboard shortcuts#Using access keys to find the ones that are relevant for you. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:22, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Even so. There are many users who don’t use devices with keyboards to access Wikipedia. Thus access keys is not something to rely on to circumvent the ellipsis. Just move the log in button from behind that ellipsis, will you.Tvx1 17:42, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Vector-2022: Avoiding slow animation

Resolved

 – Sliding is by-design, but should respect browser directive; a userscript is provided below to disable only this specific animation. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:34, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I can see how having a sticky-header on pages can be useful. But is there a way to avoid the slow animation of it appearing when I scroll down? It seems to have become a popular GUI feature, but I find it distracting. I move quickly, and it feels sluggish when the GUI has to "catch up" to what I'm doing. It also breaks by concentration by having so much motion at the top of the screen if I'm reading further down. MSOffice added that sort of thing a decade or so ago, and included a "disable animation" option. Could we have such a simple overall option, or is there a CSS trick for it? DMacks (talk) 16:13, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@DMacks maybe it's my computer, but I'm not seeing this as an "animation" at all, it seems to be a "snap" overlay - tried with firefox and chrome; are you seeing this as a moving (rolling down?) header? — xaosflux ^Talk 16:37, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's like pulling down a window-shade over the top bit of content. Takes maybe half a second or so. DMacks (talk) 16:47, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, anyone else got info on this? — xaosflux ^Talk 16:49, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@DMacks, Xaosflux: There should be a "reduce animation/motion" option in your operating system which the sticky-header (and various other animated features on Wikipedia) will respect. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion#user_preferences for where to find the setting. the wub "?!" 16:49, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@The wub thanks for the note, phab:T254399 talks about this a bit. According to phab:T290101 "slide" is the expected behavior. If you have set reduce motion in your client, and it is not working - there may be a bug. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:53, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If I am reading this correctly, this is more of a visual preference rather than anything broken. So I provided some css below that should remove the animation and make the sticky header "just appear". Terasail^[✉️] 16:55, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Xaosflux To be clear, I tested the sticky header with and without the reduce motion setting, and it worked as expected for me. The snippet is probably useful though if anyone wants to disable this particular animation without affecting everything else on their system. the wub "?!" 17:43, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@DMacks Try adding the following to your common css

#vector-sticky-header {
	transition-duration: 0ms;
}

Terasail^[✉️] 16:54, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Terasail thanks for the snippet, DMacks, can you let us know if this works for you if you try it please? — xaosflux ^Talk 16:58, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Works for me. Thanks! DMacks (talk) 18:41, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Vector-2022: Table-of-contents in diff-mode

When I am looking at a diff, the full article is below the two-column diff panes. The entries in the side-bar table of contents link to the sections in the full article pane. Except the "(Top)" table-of-contents entry, which takes me to the top of the diff panes rather than the start of the article in the article pane. DMacks (talk) 16:22, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@DMacks making sure we got this, when looking at a diff such as this one, scroll down. Clicking on (Top) goes to the "#' (top most) section of the current page, but you would rather it scroll you to the top of the article text for section-0; correct? — xaosflux ^Talk 16:41, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Bingo. It's inconsistent with the rest of the TOC. No objection to a "scroll to top of diff" link, but that's just as easy to do using my browser 'home' key. DMacks (talk) 16:44, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• @DMacks: I created a feature request, phab:T327318, about this. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:05, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

TOCs

My talk page is messed up. There is no TOC. This also appears to be the case everywhere. Mjroots (talk) 16:41, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

 Works for me @Mjroots did you change to vector-2022? If so the TOC is now in the left sidebar, under the tools. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:48, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't changed anything. TOCs have disappeared. Makes it hopeless trying to find sections of articles to edit, especially in long articles. Same for talk pages, Wikiproject talk space etc. Put the TOCs back as they were!!!! Mjroots (talk) 16:52, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Mjroots If you were using the Vector skin, a forced change to Vector-2022 may have happened for you, or you may have opted-in with a link. You can revert to Vector legacy here: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:55, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've gone back to the previous skin. New one is crap. There was nothing marked "tools" on the left of any page that I was on, so that comment was not useful for me. Mjroots (talk) 17:00, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've set the old one in my preferences, and it keeps switching randomly between them. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 17:01, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@ONUnicorn, try Special:GlobalPreferences, or try again later. — Qwerfjkltalk 17:15, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks; Global Preferences seems to have worked - for now. We'll see if it sticks. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 19:32, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

OMG User:Qwerfjkl THANK YOU for the Global Preferences setting stuff...all the white space & having to hunt for my tools...I know the next time I went into another section of the Wiki-Universe, I would have been utterly and completely lost as to how to get things fixed. Shearonink (talk) 17:43, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Is the new skin the universal default? It appeared today, and obviously as an IP I did nothing with preferences. 67.243.247.14 (talk) 17:04, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. — Qwerfjkltalk 17:14, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, IP's don't get to pick - if you would like to use a skin, please register an account. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:52, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well, why not? why don't IP's get to pick? Transcleanupgal (talk) 19:35, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Transcleanupgal, there is not current support to store this sort of setting client-side and as an IP may be simultaneously in use by multiple people having one person be able to change things for someone else is not useful (also someone's IP can change as they browse, also breaking such a preference from being stored server-side). — xaosflux ^Talk 19:48, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

thank you for clarifying. Transcleanupgal (talk) 19:49, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Transcleanupgal: phab:T91201 has more on client-side accessibly preferences in general, this isn't specific to vector-2022. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:52, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

for the record, simply "registering an account" isn't enough, one also needs to be actively using it. Secondly, why would you consider having settings for "IP" ueers stored server-side? There are plenty of session-based storage systems. -- 188.26.86.68 (talk) 19:57, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It simply doesn't exist today. See mw:How to become a MediaWiki hacker for tips on how you can start working on this if you would like. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:19, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ironically, this section doesn't show up in the new ToC. Also, if you hide the Contents there doesn't appear to be any way to get it back. Praemonitus (talk) 15:32, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I fully agree. The ToC by definition should be an essential part of the article, below the lede, introducing and giving an overview of the text body and its subsections. The new ToC is completely useless and confusing; and, yes, it is indeed ironic that subsections like this one ("TOCs") are completely hidden and unreachable without scrolling the page and reading through the myriads of section titles and comments. Also cfr. my RfC comment about it. Æo (talk) 19:31, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If you go to a page like WP:FAR, the list of reviewed articles doesn't show up on the ToC any more. That makes it essentially useless. Praemonitus (talk) 00:38, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Praemonitus, there are triangles in the table of contents that does display. Click the triangle. Subsections should now be displayed. Izno (talk) 01:16, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Izno:, I'm seeing greater-than signs, not triangles. I suppose they work like triangles in expandable lists, but it wasn't intuitively obvious. Praemonitus (talk) 01:26, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I picked the nearest shape without thinking about it too much. :) Izno (talk) 01:28, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Vector 2022 skin has been deployed

Hello everyone,

The Vector 2022 skin is now the default across English Wikipedia, which means that all logged-out readers and editors will see this skin, and that all logged-in readers and editors who had Vector 2010 as their skin were switched to the new one.  Thank you for all of your questions, feedback, and time dedicated to this project - it has helped us make the skin better for all readers and editors!

This is a big change for a lot of users, and today's deployment has been a major technical undertaking involving many staff. If you see any issues with the deployment, or are hearing about problems or confusion from others, please reply here and let us know so that we can pursue and fix them as soon as possible.

If you are new to the skin, we (the Web team at the WMF) encourage you to explore our landing page for information on configuration, gadget compatibility, bug reports, and the deployment and consensus-building process here on English Wikipedia.  For general questions, you can refer to our FAQ or ask us directly here or on the talk page of the project.  

If you would like to turn the skin off or switch to a different skin, you can do so from the "switch to old look" button in the main menu (left sidebar), or from the "Appearance" section in your preferences.  

For those of you looking forward to the new page tools menu - we've experienced some last-minute issues in the release of the feature and will wait for this week's deployment train to ensure all changes are as expected.  We will release the new page tools menu on Monday, Jan 23.  

Though today's deployment is a major milestone, we are definitely planning to continue to improve and adjust the new skin. We'll be fixing bugs and thinking about and discussing how else the skin can improve for editors and readers. Therefore, we're looking forward to your continued feedback on the new skin.  If you decide to try it out, we, the Web team, suggest trying it for at least one week prior to deciding whether to switch to one of our older skins. It usually takes a few days to begin feeling comfortable with the new interface. That said, if you are unsatisfied, you may switch to any of the other skins at any time.

Once again, we would like to thank all of you for your help over the last three years of development - from giving us constant feedback to helping us draft and run the RfC, to constantly keeping us accountable for our decisions and their impacts on readers, editors, and communities.  There are more of you than we can count, but to name just a few: the closers of the RfC who did a lot of work analyzing and summarizing the RfC (ProcrastinatingReader and ScottishFinnishRadish), and also: Andre, Awesome Aasim, Barkeep49, Bilorv, Blaze Wolf, Enterprisey, Femke, Ganesha811, Izno, JCW555, Jonesey95, L235, Lectrician1, Levivich, Pelagic, RoySmith, Sdkb, Sj, Steven Walling, Terasail, TheDJ, Qwerfjkl, WhatamIdoing, xaosflux, and Xeno - thank you, and let's keep the conversation going!

OVasileva (WMF) & SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 17:19, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I got forced to the new skin, and all TOCs everywhere dissapeared. PUT THE TOCs BACK!!!! Apparently there was supposed to be "tools" on the left hand sidebar, but I never saw anything saying "tools". Fortunately, I was able to go back to the previous skin. Mjroots (talk) 17:24, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Mjroots - thanks for your feedback. The new ToC should be visible on the left hand side of the page. It does collapse at low resolutions to allow for more content to appear on the page. It can be opened by using the button available immediately to the left of the page title. OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 17:27, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Mjroots The button for the table of contents looks like this the wub "?!" 17:34, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How on earth is anyone meant to know that is the TOC just by looking at it? Ridiculous idea. Mjroots (talk) 17:37, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I understand that there are limited resources to develop a proper desktop skin as well as a mobile one. However imo the desktop experience of the new skin is not optimal. It is highly likely that most editors would use the desktop view to do serious editing. One thing I liked in the old interface is that it allowed me to go to the main page immediately. Now this is a two-step process. 67.243.247.14 (talk) 17:29, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

67.243.247.14, One thing I liked in the old interface is that it allowed me to go to the main page immediately. Now this is a two-step process - how so? Clicking on the big Wikipedia logo on the top works for me. — Qwerfjkltalk 17:32, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

(Face palm) Indeed. Maybe I was hung up on the old "Main Page" link. 67.243.247.14 (talk) 17:36, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That is not on you. This confusion is rather because important navigation elements changed from descriptive words with explicit meaning, into icons (or in this case, logo) with no distinctive clue about clickability and user have to guess about where to click or what clicking it actually meant. (Also see @Mjroots comment about table of content "button" above) This is the same sort of dark patterns that lure users to do things on the web that they didn't mean to do; "UX devs" (I mean this in pejorative way) like to do this a lot these days. And even when looked at in the most optimistic way, this is a decline in usability.

I oppose this Vector 2022 deployment; mobile site and its obfuscated icon-avigation has no place on desktop. WMF applied this site-wide change without having a big side-wide announcement/notification about the vote; and still carry on (and weasel out the "consensus" to support themselves) in spite of more users voted against that in such stealthy vote anyway. I hadn't even got a chance to vote. This is just cowardice.

— Nvtj (talk) 05:20, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@OVasileva (WMF) / @SGrabarczuk (WMF) I mean this in the nicest possible way, as constructive feedback. Please don't ever do this to a project without an overwhelming consensus to do so, and appropriate very-obvious-over-the-top-annoying-level messaging (including detailed instructions on how to switch back) ahead of time again. SQL^{Query Me!} 01:17, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

And don't make people create an account just to avoid this awful waste of screen real estate. See my username. Browser cookies are simple, long-established, stable technology with very low overhead. This should be very simple to remedy. If the powers that be can't undo this awful new design and bring back the perfectly excellent old one, at least make it so we don't have to create an account on here to do so! I haven't made a single edit in years despite being an *incredibly* heavy user of this site as an audodidact, independent researcher, and amateur historian. Most people won't even bother, or won't realize that making an account will let them opt out of this mess, and will just suffer through it or take their web surfing elsewhere. IWantTheOldInterfaceBack (talk) 04:52, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Kill it! It’s evil! —GLaDOS on the new vector skin. But seriously folks, if I wanted a mobile view on my computer… I don’t know what I’d do, but I don’t want a mobile view on my computer, or on my tablet, and yet this is exactly what this new skin looks like. I’m extremely glad I was at least able to switch it back to the classic look, which was perfectly fine and did not need to be ”improved”. Who approved of this New Coke-for-wikipedia crap? Dronebogus (talk) 17:50, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Adjusting the new Vector 2022 skin to reduce white space

I am normally a crotchety old person who avoids new stuff, but for some reason, I decided to give Vector 2022 a real try. After using the Vector 2010 skin for over a decade, I started using Vector 2022 a few weeks ago, and I ran into a lot of the same problems that people are discovering today. The primary problem is that there is way too much white space in the new skin, despite zillions of people complaining about it to the WMF for months (years?). Some of the white space is by design, and some of it is caused by a variety of bugs and unfinished polishing of code. While waiting for the developers to fix the Vector 2022 bugs, I have hacked my common.css file to eliminate most of the problems. With these hacks in place, I have found Vector 2022 to display quite nicely.

If you are interested in trying to adapt Vector 2022 to make it usable from a white-space perspective, you could give my hacks a try.

The first step is to go to your preferences, choose the Vector 2022 skin, uncheck "Enable limited width mode", and click Save. That will make page content somewhat wider.

Then go to Special:MyPage/common.css, which will open your personal CSS file. If you are bold, I recommend copying the entire "white space issues" section of User:Jonesey95/common.css (up to about line 66) to your common.css file. Save it, and then reload the page.

If you like those changes, you might consider adding the Table of Contents hacks as well. The modifications farther down the page are of more questionable value, and I can't recommend them unless you are more comfortable with weirdness.

YMMV, and caveat emptor, and all that. Please report back here with comments and potential improvements. If something goes wrong, you can go back to your common.css file, select all of the text that you added, and delete it. That will return you to the default Vector 2022 interface. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:51, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Update: I have added a few more customizations, including continuing to reduce large amounts of (IMO) excessive padding, and hiding sets of links that I have never used in ten years of editing, and I've gotten Vector 2022 to look a lot closer to Vector 2010 while keeping the left-side TOC (in view on page load!) and some of the other updates that I see as helpful. This dense version of Vector (see first screenshot) will not be everyone's cup of tea, but if you are intrigued, feel free to copy items from User:Jonesey95/common.css. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:09, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Gadget updates?

I see in the original comment that there was a commitment to update necessary gadgets. Where do these things stand? For instance I am very much missing the gadget that allows me to view the UTC clock. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:35, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Mine is in the little "User menu" (the torso icon) at the top of the screen. I agree that it was much more convenient for it to appear without going to a menu. It is unclear to me whose job it is to update mw:MediaWiki:Gadget-UTCLiveClock.js. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:54, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Barkeep49 - thanks for your question! In terms of gadgets, we've worked with gadget maintainers to have as many gadgets as possible be compatible with the new skin before deployment. After deployment, we're on the lookout for reports on issues with gadgets and scripts and can advise and help with fixes. The clock gadget in particular is now available in the dropdown user menu at the top of the page. We could look into whether it's possible to have it display outside the menu as well. OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 18:55, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that update @OVasileva (WMF) but it's not working consistently. For instance if I click when at the top of this page the time appears. When I clicked on it just now before replying, or on other pages where I've scrolled down a fair amount, it doesn't. And to be honest the gadget loses a fair amount of utility being buried there. Given that I've updated into this change - just as I did in old Vector - I'd like it to be prominent otherwise I might as well just pin a tab with a UTC clock because at least that tab would work no matter how far down a page I am. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 19:16, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I previously made it outside the menu but got scolded by an editor on English Wikipedia so limited it to mediawiki.org. Perhaps you could run an RFC around its position and I'd happily make the change again ? Jdlrobson (talk) 20:46, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Jdlrobson can you point me to that previous "scolding"? Would just like to have full background information before launching anything formal. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:33, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Barkeep49 and others: You have noticed that the two menus labeled "User menu" with a tooltip and represented by an identical icon of a human torso are not, in fact, the same menu. This seemed like a basic user interface error to me, but when I brought it up at T325124, I was told that it was intentional that the two identical-looking menu-activation icons popped up different contents depending on whether the icon was in the top-of-page header or in the "sticky" header. I haven't found a workaround yet. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:36, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Jonsey for that link and explanation. It's genuinely helpful. I am completely surprised that their UX testing suggested that it wasn't an issue to have identical icons doing different behaviors. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:41, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Barkeep99, I'd rather not single that person out, but my sense was it was a gut reaction to change and starting an RFC won't be a problem here. They are pretty respectful of enwiki process from what I can see.

The two menus are different, indeed. If the clock wants to add itself to the sticky menu, it can call mw.util.addPortlet like so:

:::::// add gadget outside menu
:::::mw.util.addPortletLink('p-vector-user-menu-overflow', '#', 'test outside dropdown' )
:::::// add link to dropdown
:::::mw.util.addPortletLink('p-personal', '#', 'test link in dropdown' )
:::::// in sticky header dropdown
:::::mw.util.addPortletLink('p-personal-sticky-header', '#', 'test link in sticky header dropdown' )
:::::

Jdlrobson (talk) 23:48, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've reached the point where enough stuff that I depend on wasn't working (much of which like WP:SUPERLINKS I wouldn't expect someone else to fix for me) that I've switched back to classic Vector so I won't be starting any RfC. If you or someone else does start please do let me know as I'd like ot be a part of that discussion and consensus finding. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:13, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How to have user menu stuck open

In Firefox, there is an option to create a user stylesheet (not to be confused with custom stylesheets on Wikipedia) which can reformat all webpages. How can I, before I log in, use this to make the Vector 2022 have the user menu stuck open without me having to click on the menu button? I would also like the menu to be wider, with items "inline" (in a horizontal row). I know this will require some white space above the heading in order not to hide the coordinates and other content in articles, but I don't care about the extra white space I will have to scroll through.

I have made this as an attempt:

#p-personal .vector-menu-content {
  display:block!important;
}

However, it doesn't work. Utfor (talk) 18:20, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Utfor the "user menu" isn't served to not-logged-in users - what "menu button" are you referring to on the not-logged-in screen? — xaosflux ^Talk 18:27, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I mean the three dots next to "Create account" in the top right corner of the screen. The menu I must use in order to log in. Utfor (talk) 18:35, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Utfor while not what you are really looking for, if your main goal is just to have a login link because that is what you are always wanting there, you could script to change the create account button to a logon button. (Still peeking at your original request, but it may require js not just css). — xaosflux ^Talk 18:46, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW that is the "more options" menu. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:56, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

User:Xaosflux Clicking the three dots is an extra step I must take to get to the login page. I would like a login link I can click directly. I know that I can create a bookmark in the browser, but this is not what I am looking for because it does not return me to the page to which I have navigated. Utfor (talk) 19:02, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I understand, just not exactly sure what to tell you on this yet. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:25, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The CSS that makes it display when clicking around is

 .vector-menu-checkbox:checked ~ .vector-menu-content {
  opacity:1;
  visibility:visible;
  height:auto
 }

Removing :checked in the selector causes it to display always for me while logged out.

 .vector-menu-checkbox ~ .vector-menu-content {
  opacity:1;
  visibility:visible;
  height:auto
 }

I am not totally certain how to make that apply only while logged out. I see no useful selectors on the body element. Izno (talk) 19:36, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

User:Izno Thank you very much! This is great! You have saved me for many wasted log-in clicks! It does not matter if it does not apply only when logged out. Utfor (talk) 20:26, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A JS solution would be less prone to future breakage:

::document.getElementById('p-personal-checkbox').checked = true
::

Jdlrobson (talk) 23:50, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Toggle for expanding screen width not visible on Wikipedia, but visible on Mediawiki

Also Mediawiki displays at an almost illegible tiny text size on my desktop, while the size of Wikipedia text is larger on my desktop than on my laptop. Is this how it is supposed to work? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 18:41, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Pbsouthwood - thanks for your report. Could you share some screenshots if possible? The toggle should be visible across all pages and projects once your screen is wide enough for it to not overlap the content (around 1600px). OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 18:49, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Pbsouthwood can you check if your browser "Zoom level" is at 100%, or something else? — xaosflux ^Talk 19:26, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Xaosflux, OVasileva (WMF) I am not sure how to check current zoom level, bu it is affected by zoom. When I zoom out it appears along with grey margins, when I zoom in it disappears along with the grey margins. So probably not a bug so much as not being able to see something I was told would be there. An explanation in the FAQ should suffice. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 07:18, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Pbsouthwood it is a browser setting, what browser are you using? — xaosflux ^Talk 10:32, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Toggle Limited Content Width bug on Main_Page

When on the Main Page, if you turn off limited content width with the bottom right button a scroll bar will appear across the bottom of the browser window. You can only scroll side to side ~6px and this issue doesn't appear on any other page while using Vector 2022. StereoTypo (talk) 18:55, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I can reproduce the same on current Firefox/W10 on Main Page. I have no idea what's causing that. Izno (talk) 19:19, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Already filed as phab:T324783. Matma Rex talk 19:21, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Vector-2022: Watchlist "star" tooltips missing

Resolved

 – The gadget was updated. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:43, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Previously when I hovered on the star at the top of a page, it would pop a tooltip "Add this page to your watchlist" or "Remove this page from your watchlist". Now, when a page is scrolled down so that the star is in the persistent header, that is still the behavior. But if I am scrolled to the top of the page, hovering on the star in the full header instead gives me the usual popup-pageview as for a regular bluelink. DMacks (talk) 19:07, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@DMacks I'm seeing the tool tip "add this page to your watchlist" on both the normal and sticky header by default. This seems like a possible conflict with Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups. Do you have that enabled? Does the problem go away if you disable it? (If so you can report the problem here: Wikipedia talk:Tools/Navigation popups). — xaosflux ^Talk 19:31, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this is a navpopups problem. I vaguely remember that nav popups has a list of elements that it ignores generally and this likely wasn't updated yet for navpopups. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:57, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@DMacks I implemented a fix that TheDJ proposed for that gadget, any better? — xaosflux ^Talk 01:53, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Looks good. Thanks! DMacks (talk) 17:41, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Roll back default on en.WP

Between the overshoot on whitespace, article layout issues, and broken navigation it seems like a no-brainer that Vector 2022 shouldn't be the default on enWP yet, if ever. Thoughts on rolling this back until the skin is fully cooked? VQuakr (talk) 19:38, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Rolling it out in this advanced beta form is probably the only way to get enough eyeballs on it to get the remaining obvious bugs fixed. I am certain that the WMF development teams cleared their calendars in advance and will be working feverishly on the dozens of bugs that are submitted this week in order to show that they are committed to the success of this product. That is the only sensible way to manage a product rollout of this type. It will be a refreshing experience to see a beta product rolled out and then have a bunch of little annoyances polished off in a few weeks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:43, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Table of content (TOC) at the top?

So I have troubles finding a solution in which I want to move table of content (TOC) back to the top as it was in the old skin. Any suggestions as how to do this if this is possible? Otherwise, skin seem to be adequate for me personally, so far. --Legion (talk) 20:06, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Legion, do I understand you correctly, you'd like to see the old version of the ToC, just as your personal setting? Here's code that does that. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 20:22, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Chief of Staff if by "the old skin" you mean Vector legacy, the TOC wasn't "at the top" it was "in the content" (by default at the bottom of section-0) - is that what you mean? — xaosflux ^Talk 20:22, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I should clarify that I was asking for desktop version. The TOC was always at the top of the article in desktop version. Not the top of the overall page itself. My apologies for the potential confusion. Legion (talk) 20:45, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A suggestion to add to your "Lessons Learned" review

I won't add to the abundance of complaints about this new skin (although I could if the representatives from the Foundation wish), but I'll suggest something that should be discussed in your postmortem on this rollout. Like many, I was surprised to find the new skin when I opened Wikipedia this morning (PST time), & wondered why I had not seen any announcement that it was coming. I see from your comment above that you did publicize this rollout -- you announced on this page, probably on some of the communication channels -- but in the banners announcing beta tests for this new skin, I didn't see any announcement that a rollout was planned.

Like many on Wikipedia, I tend to focus on the content, & not so much on bulletin boards or other announcement pages: I make my edits, look at updates on my Talk page, or any pings, then return to my off-Wiki life. While I did see the banners about beta testing the new skin, I assumed these were not part of any immediate rollout, but requests for feedback on proposed changes, & since I had no strong opinions about the interface I ignored them. Now had I known this was part of a planned update with a specific date, I might have participated in the beta test, but I definitely would have known the default skin was going to be changed. To make my point clear, next time the Foundation plans a major change like this it would help if the banners were also used to announce this, & not just depend on announcement on the relevant bulletin boards. -- llywrch (talk) 19:50, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for this feedback @Llywrch - this is a good idea. We will definitely be compiling a list of lessons learned that we can use for future releases. We did run banners to all logged-in users announcing that the change is happening this week. Unfortunately, it seems that because these banners came right after the general banners for people to try out the skin and the banner design was quite similar, the change in the banner content wasn't as obvious as we had hoped. OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 19:57, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

One lesson learned could be to revert back to the old design given the intense feedback. IWantTheOldInterfaceBack (talk) 05:14, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Again, logged-out users weren't even a remote consideration? 142.162.17.231 (talk) 14:28, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Llywrch we do have it on the watchlist banner as well. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:25, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm. If there was an announcement, then I didn't see it. And since this caught more than me by surprise, I'm guessing that announcement wasn't visible enough. -- llywrch (talk) 21:11, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

As I always say: Ppl will always complain about lack of announcements. It doesn't matter how much communication is done. if ppl don't care about it, hide it or simply skim over because they work on other things, no notification other than blocking them from achieving their goal (ie. by blanking the entire page) will make them notice. Ppl are not here for caring about the skin, they are here to build the wiki. There is no fixing this problem and its already part of every "lessons learned". —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:12, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If they're part of 'every "lessons learned"', then the lesson isn't getting learned, is it? 98.169.155.227 (talk) 03:48, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Some people noticed, others didn't. That is pretty much a universal constant. If the notices are made unmissable there will be other complaints about them being obtrusive. Someone will always complain. Many of us have learned how to not see advertising because of all the clickbait we get spammed with on the internet, so we also miss notifications. It is a defence mechanism. Has there not been a study on how best to notify the community while annoying the lowest number? Is it up to date? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 07:35, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There was nothing to notice. These banners were shown only to logged-in users. 142.162.17.231 (talk) 14:29, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Only it was in reality "a few people noticed, almost everyone didn't. And there's not just some complaining. Almost everyone is complaining and requesting the changed back. Time to accept reality and do so!!Tvx1 17:34, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Heavily used menu items

The heavily used choices should be available as words and direct choices, as they were before. "Watchlist" is hidden behind an icon and introduces a big delay to what used to be fast. Other heavily used choices were not only moved to sub-menu items but the menu that they are buried in is itself hidden behind an icon. Also page curation choice disappeared. North8000 (talk) 21:30, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"page curation choice" what is that ? Doesn't sound like a default part of the software, maybe its a gadget that you installed which needs updating ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:55, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@TheDJ page curation is Special:NewPagesFeed and the associated JavaScript that loads on pages (linked from there?). Izno (talk) 22:01, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know the IT side, but it's the entry into the New Page Patrol universe and toolbox, a large and important part of the Wikipedia system. I think that the overall system/ toolbox is called page curation. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 22:45, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're referring to User:Lourdes/PageCuration.js, a user script which you have installed. I tested it just now and the link still appears, it is just hiding in the top right dropdown menu. Try clicking on the person icon and see if that reveals the link for you. Hope this helps. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:14, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Novem Linguae: Thanks but I don't see it there. BTW whatever it is, my intentions were to just use the main official toolbox for NPP. North8000 (talk) 14:40, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@North8000. Consider posting screenshots if you'd like to troubleshoot this further. Here's some screenshots of what I think we're talking about. Correct me if I'm wrong. –Novem Linguae (talk) 15:41, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Novem Linguae: Thanks. That's where I looked and it wasn't there. Then after I saw your post I went to my user page and looked at that menu and it was there. Maybe that "woke it up" because now it is always there, e.g. when at other articles. Thanks. North8000 (talk) 16:53, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Font rendering bug related to scrolling on new vector style

I'm noticing a new transient error on multiple pages since the new vector theme was released. Sometimes after scrolling the page up/down and stopping rapidly, the text font will appear "doubled", as if two versions of it are laid over each other, causing the text to appear bolder/deeper black, and have much higher contrast, which is ugly and causes slight artefacting around character edges. This will then resolve after scrolling away/reloading/switch the tab away and then back.

The most reliable way I have found to induce this is to scroll down on a long page and then hold the mouse wheel to scroll up to the top very rapidly, making the top of the page stop the rapid scroll instantaneously. This will semi-reliably produce the bug after a few attempts. I am using Chrome on Win10. This never happened to me previously on Wikipedia before the new theme was released, as far as I can recall.

The issue looks like this (top is with the bug, bottom is without).

Obviously not a major issue, but I am lukewarm enough about the new theme without there also being irritating technical glitches with it that were not caught during testing. BlackholeWA (talk) 21:28, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@BlackholeWA This seems to be a bug in Chrome (see phab:T322978 and https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1363981) and they are apparently working on a fix. the wub "?!" 21:37, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, thanks for the heads up. It might be worth noting for the Vector 2022 developers that in the context of Wikipedia something in the new theme has induced it to occur, though. BlackholeWA (talk) 22:27, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hello @BlackholeWA. Thank you for raising this issue. I'm not sure if "something in the new skin is inducing this to occur" is the best expression (I'm not an English native speaker) but from the perspective of our team, the problem is solely on the side of the browser, and it's up to them to fix it. Our code is OK, this is what I take at least. Although yes, this issue exists in Vector 2022, and doesn't in legacy.

I'm sorry that you're experiencing this - I use a Chromium-based browser on Windows, too, and I'm waiting for Google to fix this. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 23:47, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@BlackholeWA - thanks for your report! We have found a local fix while we wait for the Chromium team that we will be able to deploy tomorrow. OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 22:34, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Where to direct reader feedback?

Where should reader feedback be directed? There's been feedback on article talk pages (ex. [1]), the Teahouse and Helpdesk. I also also suggest the WMF and other interested editors to keep an eye on the Teahouse and Helpdesk to gauge the response. Apologies if this has already been discussed above but if so, I did not easily find it. S0091 (talk) 21:52, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@S0091 I suppose what kind of feedback it is matters. General comments can prob go to Wikipedia talk:Vector 2022; technical questions can go right here. — xaosflux ^Talk 22:41, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Xaosflux I did not know about Wikipedia:Vector 2022 and have been at least loosely following the discussions so good to know. Thanks! S0091 (talk) 23:09, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Explore Wikipedia's new look

If I am signed out, or signed in with an alternate account I use to thank people or see how things are for new people (normally this is only with private browsing), I have been shown a link to "Explore Wikipedia's new look". They show different ways Wikipedia has looked over the years and of course I prefer what was shown for 2011 and have my preferences set for that. If there is not already a topic for this, I just want to be assured all this will not mean changing what I want to see.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:34, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Vchimpanzee, your display may change but if it does you can change it back by selecting Vector 2010 in Special:Preferences. Izno (talk) 22:05, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

As I recall, Vector is what I don't want.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 23:24, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hello @Vchimpanzee. If you're satisfied with the 2011 look, then you're referring to what's now called "Vector legacy". Technically, it's a frozen version of the skin which since 2020, has evolved into the new default, Vector 2022. Unless I'm mistaken, Vector (legacy) is what you want. Correct me if I'm wrong :) SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 23:31, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Correction. If you go to the link I posted and scroll down and watch the look of Wikipedia change, it is the 2005 look that I want. I did notice differences in the 2011 look but it does have the right fonts.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 23:50, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing looks different now compared to yesterday. I'm getting mixed results with private browsing.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 00:08, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Vchimpanzee note in private browsing/logged out mode - some pages may be displaying in vector, some in vector-2022 due to caching. Eventually the cache will clear the old ones. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:31, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

My main concern is how it will look to me when signed in.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 17:30, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

ToC Bug Report

The Vector 2022 page pointed me here to file a bug report. I'm not totally convinced this is actually the right place, so please redirect me if there's somewhere this is more likely to be acted on.

The sticky ToC is programmed to indicate the current section by detecting that section going off the top of the screen. When the sticky top bar is present, it is smart about scrolling the header to the correct position below the bar when you click a section title, but this logic is not reflected in the indicated section as you scroll, such that you frequently end up with zero lines of text from the indicated section visible on the screen (because they are behind the top bar). Personman (talk) 21:49, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Personman - thank you for your report! We are trying to reproduce. Could you share the link to a page where you encountered this on? OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 22:14, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I encounter it on every page with a ToC. Here's an image of it happening on this page: https://i.imgur.com/Z3YY9vb.png Personman (talk) 22:41, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I briefly thought this might be impacted by my browser zoom, which was at 150% in that screenshot. But no, it happens at every zoom level: https://i.imgur.com/CEh2w1t.png.

While exploring this, I also repeatedly encountered another bug, where the indicated section gets totally stuck or is totally absent: https://i.imgur.com/PiQNGM1.png. This doesn't seem to be easily reproducible, but it happened three different times, after some combination of zoom changes, scrolls, and clicking Reply and then cancelling.

I'm on macOS Chrome, if that helps. Personman (talk) 22:50, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the screenshots @Personman - this helped us identify the issue. I believe this can be resolved by the following tweaks to the ToC. First, we can increase the threshold for when a section is active so that the section which is on the screen appears first. You can track progress on this in this ticket. We will also be increasing the offset for when you click a link from the ToC so the title of the section selected has a little bit of space above it when selected. That should help with how close the ToC and sticky header are to one another. Progress on the second issue can be tracked in this ticket. Thanks again for the bug reports! OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 23:50, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Also to note: we do have some known (but not yet documented) bugs with the table of contents on Talk pages. Are you experiencing these issues on article pages as well? AHollender (WMF) (talk) 23:49, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Disabling "Enable limited width mode" as the default?

As many of us tried (and failed) to explain to the WMF developers, the huge amount of white space on the right side of the page continues to be the primary complaint among people complaining about this change. The developers allowed for a checkbox in the Preferences that reduces some of the white space, but that checkbox is not available to logged-out readers, and it is not the default here at en.WP. Should we consider an RFC (not at VPT, but at an appropriate location) to disable "limited width mode" by default for logged out readers, for people who are selecting Vector 2022 for the first time, and for those who have not expressed a preference? – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:08, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Jonesey95 there is a "toggle limited content width" button for readers. But (a) it is hidden at the very bottom of the page, (b) it is not persistent across anything, even following links or reloading the page. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:14, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've opened phab:T327366 regarding the ephemeral nature of that option. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:11, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have never seen such a toggle, though I have heard rumors of its existence. Everything I have seen has said that it exists for windows 1000px wide or wider. My (Brave, Mac OS, latest version) browser window has 1,236 pixels of space between the left side of the window and the left side of the scroll bar, but I do not see a toggle (logged out or logged in). A toggle does not appear, even if I hide the left-side TOC and menu. Is this a bug, or do I misunderstand the repeated references to a toggle? Maybe I just don't know what it looks like. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:27, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Jonesey95 It looks like this and should appear in the bottom right of the screen. the wub "?!" 00:09, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

An aside about "the toggle":

Why is so much Wikipedia functionality now hidden (maybe even obscured?) behind icons in Vector 2022?...if you don't know what three dots or the "person icon" or what the toggle icon means, too bad. A lot of people, IP-readers and editors, experienced named accounts have been posting here and elsewhere on Wikipedia, like on Talk:Vector 2022 about "where do I find [a previous clearly-seen function]?". Shearonink (talk) 14:46, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Jonesey95 it appears for me at 1479px wide, it looks like 4 right angles. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:09, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I can't make it appear, even in safemode, logged out. I have submitted T327368(ETA: Already existed at T326887). Maybe I just misunderstand when this thing is supposed to appear, but you can see from the screen shot at the bug page that there are huge white margins that need to go away for the page to display correctly. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:57, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I would support this. "Enable limited width mode" should be disabled as the default for all readers, logged in or not. Some1 (talk) 04:18, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Just a personal preference, or have you done a survey with the readers for whom this feature was designed to support this request? My personal preference is larger font size as a default, because it is difficult to increase the font size if you cant read the instructions because the font is too small. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 07:50, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Just a personal preference and after seeing all the IPs (who I assume are general readers and not editors) complaining about the excess white space of the new skin. About the font size (and you may already know this), see if holding down the CTRL button then tapping on the + (plus sign button) helps; it should increase the font size of webpages including Wikipedia (CTRL+[minus sign] if you want to make it smaller). I don't think font sizes are adjustable in the User preferences; maybe you could add a proposal to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2023 (which apparently is open for submissions in just a couple of days). Some1 (talk) 12:57, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Searching in Vector 2022

I'm probably one of the many people asking questions about the new skin. First of all, I would like to say how excited I am to be using this new skin. I am aware that I can change the skin back to old Vector if need be. I would like to know if there is a way for the search suggestions to display redirects alongside articles without having to change back to the old skin. Interstellarity (talk) 00:51, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Interstellarity can you give an example of what is different? For example this search seems to be the same in vector and vector-2022. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:26, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, here is an example: when you type in wp:vp or john paul ii in the search box without hitting enter in the search suggestions, it shows where the page redirects to rather than the page that is in the form of a redirect. Hope I clarified. Interstellarity (talk) 01:33, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Interstellarity and you are just comparing the search suggestion outputs correct? (Not clicking search either) I do see they are different. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:46, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Interstellarity does phab:T323345 describe your situation? — xaosflux ^Talk 01:47, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There is also phab:T303013 which is about marking when a redirect is being used in search and is marked as inprogress. Terasail^[✉️] 06:26, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Xaosflux, @Terasail: Yes, I am comparing the search suggestion outputs. The Phabricator that Terasail mentioned matches closely to what I am asking about. Interstellarity (talk) 12:39, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Change of template.

The hiding of the left hand bar is no good. I don't use a log in and I don't want to have to set one up or have to log into Wikipedia wherever I may be browsing it in order to stop the control panel disappearing every time I click a link. This is rapidly becoming a vexing repetitive task that is reducing the enjoyment I get from using this website and the ease of its operation. 123.200.143.83 (talk) 04:32, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

(Context: this is a complaint about Vector 2022) DS (talk) 04:38, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Anonymous user, thanks for commenting here. Could you tell us why you need to use the left hand bar? Do you need access to any specific links? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 15:47, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is terrible! Bring back the old website design now!

This seems to be the place to report technical issues. I don't even have a particularly large laptop and even still 60% of my screen is useless white space. And if I use my big desktop monitor that I got specifically to see more information at once, probably would be over 80%. If I want to see less at once I narrow my browser window. When I first saw this I thought that I had somehow accidentally been routed onto the mobile website from my laptop.

I urge you all to undo this and bring back the old version. Or at least make it so people don't have to make an account (see my username) to fix this. 99% of people won't bother and will just suffer through the new unreadable interface. That is not a good thing!

Even if this won't happen, I urge you to at least make it so you don't need to make an account. Surely a simple browser cookie storing design preference for a user is reasonably straightforward to implement?

How on earth did this get approved? IWantTheOldInterfaceBack (talk) 04:43, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Addendum: apparently the FAQ for this new design says best practice is only 35 to 100 characters per line, and that it is recommended to be on the lower end of this range. What now?!?!?!

I suppose we need to shrink the page

width even more now to meet this

onerous requirement which was cert-

ainly designed by someone in an

ivory tower with no conception of

how people actually use the inter-

net. IWantTheOldInterfaceBack (talk) 04:48, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@IWantTheOldInterfaceBack: I completely and wholeheartedly agree. While logging in allows us to retain the legacy format, it's still pretty big for logged-out browsing. I dislike the new look as much as you, but unfortunately, if we're to be realistic, Vector 2022 is probably here to stay. Skippy2520 (talk) 04:53, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You miss all the shots you don't take. It's been many years since I attempted to dip a toe into Wikipedia editing, and I don't remember any of the processes involved except that they were needlessly convoluted, but surely it's better to try and get whoever did this to reverse it, than to just lie down and accept it. IWantTheOldInterfaceBack (talk) 04:54, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There you go, Have you made a survey of all the people who are not complaining? do you have any idea of the relative numbers? Have you even counted the number of people who have demanded the old skin back as a default because they just don't like the new one? You do know that you can still use the old skins if you just take the trouble to set your preferences? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 09:47, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

As a 5 hour old account I assume you were previously an IP editor, because if you are socking with this account you should know better. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 09:54, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Many people made accounts or dug up ancient ones to get around the changes because without an account the scale setting and other features don't work.

Forcing people to make accounts for simple accessibility features seems counterproductive or even hypocritical of the ideals of the update. Deadoon (talk) 10:07, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Forcing people to log into accounts they haven't used for over 10 years just to be able to read the wiki without having to visit an eye-doctor afterwards is both counter-productive, extremely daft and against the principles of the foundation Peter. But you will see that when the donations stop rolling in. I for one am going to start withholding mine until you give non-users the option to switch to the old theme. 82.78.21.194 (talk) 13:34, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@IWantTheOldInterfaceBack: As a long-time editor, I want to second what you've said. I strongly, strongly dislike this new look and I hate how it was rolled out.--Gen. Quon_[Talk] 16:13, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Gen. Quon You are free to change back to the old skin in your account preferences. This skin has been in the works for years and has included community input opportunities along the way. The changeover was announced in advance as well. Please offer comments at the talk page of Vector 2022. 331dot (talk) 16:16, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@331dot: Some comments:

• "You are free to change back to the old skin in your account preferences." I never said I couldn't. I'm voicing my opinion and adding to the chorus so that editors will see that there is dissatisfaction.
• "This skin has been in the works for years and has included community input opportunities along the way." Aesthetics aside, this is another reason why I'm ticked: I did offer comment during the hilarious show trial "period of community input" (when 165 opposition votes were largely written off for being too concerned with "specific and narrowly-scoped [issues], rather than wholesale objections to Vector 2022", whereas the 154 "positive" and "enthusiastic" supporters were described in terms that made them sound like they formed a resounding huge majority). I feel like my input was totally written off so that this design could be rubber-stamped.
• "The changeover was announced in advance as well." Why don't you tell that to the many IPs, etc. who were blind-sided and see what they have to say, hmmm? Today, I've had two coworkers who don't really edit come up to me and say, "Yo, what's up with Wikipedia?"

But I'm assuming my opinions will simply be brushed off and categorized again as "specific and narrowly-scoped". Hmmph.--Gen. Quon_[Talk] 16:38, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Gen. Quon If you have ideas on how to communicate a change in a website design to all 7 billion humans on this planet, something which is difficult for any piece of information, please offer those ideas to the Foundation. 331dot (talk) 16:43, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Communicating a change to 7 billion humans is not feasible. A better plan would be to listen to the criticism and revert the change. The best plan would have been to listen to the warnings, of which we gave plenty, and simply not make such an unpopular change. There are many other features which we actually want crying out for developers' time. Certes (talk) 17:33, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Certes What change do you want that will please everyone? Do you have studies and testing to support that? Because the Foundation does. 331dot (talk) 20:08, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

One glance at pages like WP:VPT and WT:Vector 2022 shows that there is no consensus for the changes. Of course, people complain more readily than they praise, but in 30 years' professional computing experience I've never seen any reaction remotely approaching the breadth of hostility generated by Vector 2022. And to answer the comment which just arrived below: yes, communication would have been helpful. Not 7 billion personally addressed letters, but some sort of warning beyond the technical pages read only by a few hundred regular editors. However, I doubt that the release could have gone ahead if this response had occurred in public and in advance. I will be very interested to read what the technical press say once they wake up to the story. Certes (talk) 20:16, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

And communicating with everyone is what people seem to be asking for; "I wasn't told! I didn't know! My two buddies in the office didn't know!" What should the Foundation have done? Asked every worldwide media outlet to run a story? You don't need to answer me, tell them. 331dot (talk) 20:12, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The same goes for if you have ideas as to how to change a website in such a way that no person on this planet will be upset with it. 331dot (talk) 16:44, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

331dot I get your defensiveness, but please do not be condescending to me. I'm mad not simply because I dislike the changes: I'm mad because the RfC was perhaps the worst example of "consensus-making" I've seen on this site and because the rollout was done in such a sloppy, haphazard way.--Gen. Quon_[Talk] 17:08, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You keep quoting the number of people on the planet (incorrectly), but is that accurate regarding the number of pageviews and active users the site has? The actual data regarding user opinion seems to have been ignored. AtomicFi (talk) 20:03, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

AtomicFi That couldn't be more wrong. I get that change is hard for people, but at least get the facts right. They tested it. They asked for input. They studied it. They can't please everyone. To expect that is unreasonable. 331dot (talk) 20:16, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Gen. Quon It's not my intention to be condescending, I apologize. Nor am I defensive. I am frustrated at the general vitriol by people about this. All I want to see is a little understanding from people. I don't want people to like it if they don't like it, but there are constructive ways to offer suggestions. They don't need to say the developers are idiots or worse(not saying you have).

I was serious- if you have ideas as to how the change in this website could be better communicated to the population of this planet, please offer them. 331dot (talk)°

I completely agree. I don't follow technical developments so there may be a deeper rationale for the update that I'm missing, but from a purely user experience perspective this is a change for the worse. And while we can switch to the old interface in account settings, I'm sure this option will be removed at some point. Litawor (talk) 09:10, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Litawor - thanks for your feedback. Just wanted to confirm that we have committed to maintenance and bug fixes for the legacy Vector skin into the future. User preferences on Wikipedia allow you the option to choose between all available skins. This option will not be removed in the future. OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 20:33, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

YES!

This is shining example of the "design" decision done for very dubious reasons. Mobification of desktop version for the purpose of what? - Wasting way more space on the user's monitor, being more way more white (pun intended), lowering the information density on the page.

At first I thought, that I have a problem on my browser and it loaded a mobile version on wikipedia, but no, this abnomination is realy inteded for desktop users by the developers. IJustCreatedAccountBecauseOfThis1diocy (talk) 13:54, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Put this template on your userpage if you don't like the new look

Here: Skippy2520 (talk) 05:02, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This user prefers the Legacy version of the Vector skin to the 2022 version.

{{User Vector skin legacy}}

This is a barebones template so, for people confused about how to position it properly, remember to use {{right}} around it or some equivalent. — LlywelynII 08:14, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@LlywelynII: Good idea! Added!--Gen. Quon_[Talk] 16:23, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Is there some eway I can see how many people have this template on their user pages? A Category or something? Thx, Shearonink (talk) 18:16, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The call to {{Userbox}} could have a parameter such as |usercategory=Wikipedians who prefer Vector 2010. That might be a subcategory of Category:Wikipedians who use Vector (though technically one could prefer V2010 to V2022 and still use, e.g., Timeless.) If not, there's always WhatLinksHere. By the way, our preferred skin might survive longer if the template name and content refer to it as "2010" rather than "legacy". The latter carries overtones of deprecation, suggesting that Vector 2022 makes it obsolete. Certes (talk) 19:31, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Let the readers choose new styles

Please, let the readers choose a different skin, not the designers, not the editors. Protect Classic skin, and add a please try out our new style button. At least for some trial years. Please, allow new styles to develop and get accepted naturally, step by step.
Keep adding options and comments at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Reading/Web/Desktop_Improvements
Thank you, from el.wiktionary Sarri.greek (talk) 05:36, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sarri.greek These things have been done, at least on the English Wikipedia. Any issues with the Greek Wikipedia, you will need to discuss there. 331dot (talk) 15:50, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I was referring to the public, 331dot not to the editors. I am not an editor of any wikipedia, I am an en. and el. wiktionary editor (where we vote for the slightest changes). If I am not wrong, the past months, there was no warning to the public (I have not seen one)? It is a matter of good manners to allow them to approach new styles by their own choice, and not force them to log in.

PS, for example, I have Microsoft Edge, and I cannot see Contents. Because I study unlogged very often, I shall try to find different options, with older versions of pages found elsewhere. Thank you. Sarri.greek (talk) 21:03, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Sarri.greek, if the Contents is hidden (the default display says "Contents [hide]"), then look for an icon at the top by the page title. It looks little bit like a bullet list with three items. That's where the Table of Contents ends up if you hide it. If you have a narrow screen, you'll see the same icon in the upper corner. Click on it to see the Table of Contents. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:33, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you ma'am, I am too old to keep clicking things around. I shall seek a different solution for viewing wikipedia lemmata. @User:Whatamidoing (WMF), I understand your difficult position, but the Public Relations team (if there is one), has not prepared unlogged readers in the previous year for this change (I have not seen any notice: try out a new style and tell us... It feels like an attack. I wonder if anyone from the WMF staff resigned about this... Farewell. Sarri.greek (talk) 22:53, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sarri.greek That you didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't done. This was studied and tested for years with community input. Please understand it is difficult to communicate with everyone on this planet about a change to a website. 331dot (talk) 23:02, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I did not mean for internal community, 331dot. Why not one little galant gesture: Give a button for switching to Classic Style, clearly visible on top of pages. Why is it so difficult? This discussion is endless because it is also a subjective matter of aesthetics and courtesy. Thank you. Sarri.greek (talk) 23:08, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

According to the information about the skin, there are privacy issues with allowing IPs to choose a skin; it would require storing that information somewhere. 331dot (talk) 23:18, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A cookie on the user's device which simply records the choice of skin would not report any personal information. It's less identifying than screen size, browser version, etc. which we and every other website provider already gather. The only downside I can see is marking someone as having visited Wikipedia, which might be a problem in a few draconian jurisdictions, but they already have easier ways to log that. It would not remove the need to cache each page in each skin, but that's equally a problem if people use ?useskin= either manually or by script. Certes (talk) 10:29, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Certes I think this is more of issue of page caching and performance; having to dynamically change what is served on every page read based on local client storage isn't cheap. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:41, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, there are apparently serious WP:PERFORMANCE issues involved in customizing things for logged-out users. This is one of the reasons why large-scale A/B testing is complicated on this wiki. Theoretically, the problem could be solved, but not quickly and not cheaply. My impression (which could be wrong, of course) is that this would cost something multiple tens of millions of dollars to get started (e.g., hardware, necessary software changes) plus ongoing staff costs of at least ten million per year. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:12, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Sarri.greek, I'm not in the m:Communications department, so I don't know what's been done to talk to external media. There have been public announcements, e.g., blog posts starting in 2020 and a press release this week, but whether changing the appearance of Wikipedia would interest any news media, especially in advance of anything visible happening, is not something I would try to predict. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:24, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

media? @Whatamidoing (WMF) media releases are like ads. I did not mention them. For external community (unlogged readers), the medium has been here. Sarri.greek (talk) 21:53, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think that if I went to a website that I use casually, and there were a banner telling me that they were planning to change the appearance next year, I might feel more frustrated than helped. I'm sure that the people involved in planning a major change are interested in it and think that it's very important, but why should I care, especially months in advance?

My bank changed its website last year. Thinking back on it: I would not have appreciated notice of the change very far in advance. I might have slightly appreciated a note one/a few days in advance, saying something like "Starting Monday, our website will look different". I did appreciate them posting a note when I first saw the changes. The notice they posted said something like "We have updated our website", but as far as I was concerned, the main message they needed to communicate was "No, you haven't been hacked; we changed the website".

If we assume, for the sake of round numbers, that websites get overhauled an average of every 10 years, and if we assume that I use 100 websites frequently, then I'm probably dealing with noticeable changes to 10 websites every year. I don't think I want to have 10 websites telling me about their upcoming changes all year long. I suspect that I'm fairly typical in this regard. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:46, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@User:Whatamidoing (WMF): With all that said, I think some pre-warning and an orientation would have been helpful for the transition (there'd be some cookies deposited on user devices, but it shouldn't be much of a privacy concern). —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 07:05, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@User:Whatamidoing (WMF) and Tenryuu Thanks:) I meant that they would be able to try it for a year = a transition period. As it is done during switches at public services, channels etc. And PS When my bank changed to an ultra modern style (All my instruction notes about what to click were useless), plus because they never bothered to warn me, I took my money and went to another bank. Now, I have saved a ClassicVector page, i emptied the bodytext, and i copypaste in there texts from wikiwand or wikipedias, and view them. Old people like me, have trouble writing down new instructions: to do this and that, go to top, right hand, and click the little blue round thing...:):) Sarri.greek (talk) 09:58, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Logged-out users (i.e., most readers) don't have that option for technical reasons. Logged-in users have been invited to try it out for months, with big banners at the top of the page. The first set had a pink background. The last set had a light blue background.

As for how long they've been running... I asked my teammate Szymon to make a CentralNotice banner about Wikipedia:DiscussionTools in August, and that was probably inspired by a banner he was running, so they're probably at least that old. They haven't run continuously, though. In terms of efficacy, as of mid-November, more people opted-in via those banners and other on-wiki announcements than were using MonoBook, so it seemed to be effective. (I don't have any more recent numbers.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:06, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

New skin has large whitespace gutters on the sides

The new Vector-2022 has a large amount of whitespace gutters at the sides of the display, padding the sidebar on its left and main display area on its right (and a disconcertingly large whitespace alley between the sidebar and main area). Additionally, there seems to be a whitespace sidebar to the right of the main area before the whitespace gutter on the right, that is completely unused except for the top menu area, that extends to the right beyond the main area? This wastes a lot of screenspace, as compared with old Vector or Monobook. I would say this is a bad bug in the new skin. Can someone add a ticket for this issue to the bugtracker? -- 64.229.90.199 (talk) 06:11, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This isn't a bug, it is the design of the new Wikipedia skin. See WP:Vector 2022 for more information Terasail^[✉️] 06:28, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Some, though not all, of the excessive whitespace problems have been acknowledged as problems and are being tracked as bugs. See, for example, T325219, T321860, T319315, T316950, and T314328. There are probably more. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:46, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I know there's the gadget and scripts to do this and I know it's not a problem with Vector 2022 specifically, but the fact that MediaWiki still doesn't have a native dark mode option is just mind-boggling. ♠JCW555 (talk)♠ 08:56, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @JCW555. I'm not sure if this has been documented somewhere, but from what I know, a technical side-effect of the new skin is that it will be easier (somewhere between "less impossible" and "easy" :D) to build the dark mode now. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 15:54, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The new format is godawful

I mean, obviously, I'm in the minority but to the extent anyone on this end of the project cares about functionality or feedback,

1) There is nothing at all improved in functionality hiding the alternative languages behind a slowly loading partial submenu on the top right instead of quickly loading full text list in the otherwise useless left gutter. The only possible improvement is for people who don't plan to ever use other languages at all.

2) Users who don't want to use interlanguage links should be the ones opting out of the side format, not the other way around.

3) When they opt out, I'm sure they'd prefer a less obnoxious format on the top right. The large cartoonish format you're using as a default has been around a while. That doesn't make it appropriate: people who want quick access to other languages hate it. People who don't want access to other languages hate it. It's too unhelpful for the first group and too large and obnoxious for the second.

4) I shouldn't have to completely nix all other changes to fix that ridiculous mistake. Currently, I need to use a special (uglier) skin in Commons so the code will load that correctly provides the zoom feature for most image commenting. I shouldn't need one here on the main project at all. I certainly don't want to have to switch between them to make the separate projects work. There should be a way to disable this awful aspect of the formatting without having to just default to the full older system. I'm sure there were some nonharmful changes or even improvements in the latest version of the skin.

5) That disabling should be FAR easier to find. It should be available instantly and prominently in the new ugly dropdown menu itself or in its settings. It's currently available in neither and I was forced to hunt here and then scroll down this textwall to find how to fix this eyesore. I'm sure most visitors to Wikipedia don't know this place even exists and are just lost and (for the 12 of us not on mobile) as annoyed as I am.

6) If this is only about mobile functionality and if it is more mobile friendly, fine but have it ONLY activate for m... versions of the pages and leave those of us who still own laptops alone.

Thanks for your attempted work and good luck fixing the mess you've made of things or at least making it easier for the rest of us to get around it. — LlywelynII 07:40, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Llywelyn: mobiles still use the old mobile version, which is frankly a lot worse than Vector 2022, with its sections that have to be opened (but don't close again) and weird star that looks like the FA icon but is actually a favourites toggle. Vector 2022 doesn't work well on desktop, although I'm sticking with it for a while to see if I can get used to it... but it might have been leveraged to work well on mobile, except it seemingly wasn't Ah well.  — Amakuru (talk) 09:37, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I concur. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Someone should open a community-wide RfC on it pronto. ~ HAL333 10:31, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

HAL333 There was a community wide RFC, Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Deployment of Vector (2022). 331dot (talk) 15:52, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@331dot: Yes, and the majority opposed it then! So why was this all implemented? Why consult with editors if their opinion isn't even weighed? ~ HAL333 16:07, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

HAL333 Nothing on Wikipedia is done by a majority vote. How do you know that opinions were not weighed? You aren't in the minds of the people who worked on this to know what they did and did not consider. That they didn't do 100% of what you or others might want doesn't mean it wasn't considered. There are 7 billion humans on this planet who can potentially access Wikipedia, all with differing views. It's tough to accomodate everyone. You are free to continue using the prior skin. Can you at least understand that no matter what they did or did not do, some group of people was going to be unhappy or upset. Seeing the vitriol directed at people by others is disturbing. 331dot (talk) 16:11, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It seems a select group of people decided that they love their new UI baby they worked on and are unwilling to accept outside opinion or criticism. Please listen to the users. A massive, poorly implemented change to the UI after nigh-on 20 years of similarity in layout seems bizarre. Your defensive tone illustrates the struggle you're all having against actually listening to the users quite well. In this case "Some group of people" seems to be a majority of your userbase.

What happened to not causing a snowball of outrage? AtomicFi (talk) 16:31, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@331dot: Nothing on Wikipedia is done by a majority vote Yeah, it's done by consensus. And there was no consensus for vector 2022. The onus was on them and they failed. So they unilaterally force their poorly designed UI on 7 billion people. That's what's disturbing here. ~ HAL333 18:06, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, it's not like the WMF has a long history of producing bright and shiny things that don't work properly, whilst ignoring their communities' requests for things that would actually make their workflow easier, but don't get done because they're boring and not bright and shiny. Black Kite (talk) 18:03, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The hostility displayed is due to what's seen as (and what I agree to be) a pointless change that disrupts work. If a new RFC was drafted and was widely visible to share thoughts with, I can foresee less personal attacks being conducted. Lucksash (talk) 20:45, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

All of this. I almost exclusively use Wikipedia on desktop, and this does absolutely nothing positive for desktop viewing. It feels like perhaps the changes are almost exclusively related to the mobile version at the expense of the desktop version, which is not acceptable. Still, I can't even understand why you'd f%ck around with the desktop version of the site, in that case. Criticalthinker (talk) 10:39, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Criticalthinker It is unreasonable to expect any website to stay the same for all time and never be changed ever. The changes have nothing to do with mobile viewin according to the information provided. 331dot (talk) 15:53, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

People fear change. It's a significant change, but one that was thought out. Maybe if people give it a chance, they'll come to like it. – Muboshgu (talk) 16:15, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Muboshgu, I clicked on that expected an xkcd, and was sadly disappointed. Here's a semi-relevant xkcd. — Qwerfjkltalk 17:06, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Muboshgu: It's not simply a matter of fearing change, it is simply less useful than Vector 2010. There is less text displayed at any given moment, more blank space, more links have been hidden in menus that are collapsed by default (so I have to click more to do things like navigate to my contributions or talk page). I'll grant that from a reader's perspective, it might be an improvement (although it really bothers me, and probably most readers, that the sidebar is wider and therefore the body text is much further from centered). But it definitely isn't an improvement for editors. I could get used to it if I must, but why would I? —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 17:55, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

People have been pointing out various things that are objectively bad. The kinds of thing that happen when you design inside of an ivory tower. They should not be insulted by saying that their main motivation is "fearing change". North8000 (talk) 18:07, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It was one that wasn't though out at all and didn't take into account anything the community complained about. Tvx1 20:42, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Change being inevitable is not an argument for any particular change to happen. At best it's a consolation of someone who was powerless to stop it and at worst it is a way to dismiss another person's opinions as stuck in the past. The idea that something like this would just happen obfuscates that it happened because certain people had the ability to impose it without asking. Vector2022IsAbsolutelyTerrible (talk) 18:59, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That makes the changes worse, then. Thanks for pointing that out to me. Criticalthinker (talk) 19:40, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You really need to stop dismissing and minimizing the complaints of almost the entire community. Sure no one expects this website to stay the same forever. That doesn't mean however that changes should be made for the sake of it and that any change is good per definition. Many people complained just how poorly designed Vector 2022 actually is. This new skin isn't a step forward in any possible way. But most importantly, there was nothing whatsoever that suggested a change was warranted in any way. At no point did the community give any indication whatsoever that original vector had become unusable to the point of a new skin being required. This is nothing but a change for the sake of it by a bunch of rogue developers who unilaterally imposed their personal desire on the wikipedia community and still refuse to show any intention of actually minding of their community's desires in any way. People aren't complaining just because something changed, but because this new imposed skin is an abysmally poorly design. It's high time you finally accept that. Tvx1 20:41, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I concur that this is a significant step back in desktop viewing. I spent about an hour figuring out how I ended up in mobile view before discovering that this wasn't mobile view. Goose2000 (talk) 19:42, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Reminder of Vector 2022 team office hours today

Just putting in a reminder to the Vector team's office hours this evening. The specific discord in question is the one accessed through WP:DISCORD. [Note: Am a mod of that Discord, but have no organisational role in the call]. Nosebagbear (talk) 15:42, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Nosebagbear a link would be nice :) — xaosflux ^Talk 17:39, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

(If there is a direct join to vector-2022 stuff) — xaosflux ^Talk 17:41, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Xaosflux - the links to the Discord are occasionally updated, and I didn't want to give a link that for anyone who is not a Discord member might end up broken and confusing. The wikipedia discord page will have the most recent public link, so felt like the best place to point people to.

However, this link is the currently working one for the event - I'll try to tweak it if it changes in the next two hours. Nosebagbear (talk) 17:48, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is a link but I'm not exactly sure how it works. Anyway, 10 hours later (06:00 UTC), we have a meeting on Zoom, too (click here to join / dial by your location). SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 17:50, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This has begun. -- ferret (talk) 20:07, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Thursday, January 19, at 20:00 UTC - on Discord, the Open Meetings voice channel

"More" panel

Hi, I've just created User:Dr. Blofeld/vector-2022.js to accompany the new skin but for some reason the more panel is displaying GB (google books link) and "Translate" twice which I obviously don't want. I also want to remove the GB ref link which I can't even see in the vector 2022 coding. Is one of my past coding pages interfering with this or something? How can I fix it? ♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:08, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Dr. Blofeld you have "Translate", "GB" and "GB ref" buttons set in User:Dr. Blofeld/vector.js. Try removing them in vector.js and see if it resolves this. If you want something to be loaded from all skins, you can move them to User:Dr. Blofeld/common.js instead. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 12:42, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That's what I thought but I couldn't find what was interfering with it! Thanks! ♦ Dr. Blofeld 13:01, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The new Vector skin currently loads vector-2022.js and vector.js. There is a phabricator bug about it that is approaching its first birthday, T301212. I don't understand why it was not resolved before the public rollout. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:49, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Position of language links button

On regular pages with the new appearance such as these few currently linked from the Main Page

R. J. Mitchell, Siege of Rouen (1418–1419), Siege of Mirandola (1511), Textile industry in Aachen

the button concealing the language links is in the top right corner of the page, as is correct according to the description.

However, for the Main Page, this button is in the bottom right corner. This is ... confusing.

It's the same whether logged in and not logged in, except, of course, for the extra language links button on your personal menu following you down the page when you're logged in. Philh-591 (talk) 16:17, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Philh-591 This is by choice (And is the same on all languages I know of). I would assume that it is placed at the bottom on the main page is so that it appears after the "Wikipedia languages" section, and the list of 1mil+, 250k+, 50k+ article lists. Terasail^[✉️] 16:53, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is phab:T293470. Izno (talk) 19:28, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Vector-2022 improvements for main menu

Not sure this is the best place to propose actual new ideas/improvement (as opposed to bugs and propagated breakage) for V2022, so feel free to tell me a better place for this sort of thing. But anyway...

The main menu is a modal/collapsible part of the sidebar, controlled by an icon in the header of each page and whose expand/collapse status persists across all pages. I generally don't care about it and instead prefer to see the table-of-contents, so I keep it collapsed. However, there are times I do want something from it, like a quick jump to wikidata/commons or one of the Special: tools. So first I have to scroll to the top, then expand the menu, then select what I want. And then collapse it again so reset the default behavior I want. Having the main-menu link even available from the condensed sticky header would save a lot of scrolling. And having it be a transient popup menu rather than a permanent toggle would save me time and annoyance when I want to generally retain its collapsed state. DMacks (talk) 17:53, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The best places for feature suggestions are probably Wikipedia talk:Vector 2022 (on en wiki) or mw:Talk:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements (project page on mediawiki) however I think that the web team are currently following this page aswell. @DMacks Most of the features you list here Page tools, project links (Com/WD) will be moving into a "Page tools menu" which will appear on the right side of the screen. It has been delayed and should be coming soon. So you would have to access the left side menu less. See MW:Page Tools / phab:T317898 / phab:T302073. Terasail^[✉️] 19:02, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently it will be deployed some time next week. Terasail^[✉️] 19:04, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the pointers. /me sits back and waits. DMacks (talk) 05:56, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your suggestions @DMacks! You have some good ideas here that I'll bring to the team to discuss (specifically thinking about potentially adding some more commonly used tools in the sticky header). One change we're making next week that aligns with some of your suggestions here is the introduction of the page tools menu which will move a lot of those tools to the left-hand side of the page. This will let you keep the main menu collapsed while having the ToC and page-specific tools open. OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 21:01, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Vector 2022 text is too light

Right now the text in the articles is too faded. Please change the text color back to #000142.157.250.127 (talk) 19:21, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Vector 2022 text uses the exact same color as old Vector, #202122.

However, in Vector 2022 the text does not use subpixel anti-aliasing (at least on my device), which can make it look less crisp / more blurry. I don't think this is an intentional change, it's just that many CSS properties disable it as a side-effect, and all the developers use high-resolution screens (I'm guilty as well) where this problem is not visible. I filed T327460 about this. Matma Rex talk 01:43, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The width toggle is insulting to logged-out users

There's a lot of good stuff in this new skin, but regardless of what the research may show for users in *general*, for *this* user, the fixed width makes Wikipedia unpleasant to use. If I could use the width toggle to persistently opt out of fixed width, I'd be reasonably happy. But the fact that 1) the toggle exists and 2) it doesn't persist makes it, legitimately, an insult. It makes me frustrated every time I click a link or reload a page, because my experience is degraded every single time. I don't know how to interpret having a toggle *and* making it utterly useless, other than as a "f*** you" to users like me. It would be better to not have the toggle at all--at least that way I would have to either adapt, or decide to stop spending as much time on wikipedia, without the temptation of a nice interface being "so close yet so far." Of course, much better would be to simply *make the damn setting persistent*!

I realize that I could have this be persistent by making an account and logging in, but I have no interest in doing so, and forcing a change like this on users to incentivize them to log in is the definition of a dark pattern. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2620:10D:C090:400:0:0:5:B5ED (talk) 20:26, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't use that a strong language to describe it, but I share the feeling. The button (which I only found after searching Wikipedia news and being directed to the Wikipedia:Vector 2022 from the community portal) is just useless if it doesn't persist the setting. I like browsing around Wikipedia a lot, but this is simply jarring the user experience.

kind regards, --93.104.14.114 (talk) 20:54, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is being worked on in phab:T321498. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:39, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

RfC opened

There is an RfC involved 2022 Vector Skin at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#RfC: Should Wikipedia return to Vector 2010 as the default skin?. Thanks, ~ HAL333 20:37, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@HAL333: In my opinion the launch of the RfC was a bit rushed. It would have been better to plan carefully how to advertise it to all users, both registered and unregistered. Also, while RfCs are not polls, I think that it would have been better if the comments were split into two sections, support and oppose, and numbered as it was in the previous RfC. Æo (talk) 14:04, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Logo/Wordmark

Is there an easy way with Vector (2022) to keep the logo/wordmark from being overwritten with the title of the article? I am using BrandonXLF's javascripts with Vector (2010) to keep the side/top bars floating. I usually have multiple WikiProjects open at the same time. Seeing the site logo is an important reminder of where I am. Thanks! — WILDSTAR^TALK 22:50, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I assume you mean within the "sticky header" and in that case, not unless you (or someone) creates custom javascript to insert the wikipedia logo into the header. Terasail^[✉️] 00:54, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Terasail, yes, that is correct. Pinging author @BrandonXLF, who I'm hoping may be able to adapt either of his two Javascripts, FloatSide or Floathead, or create a new one to once again accomplish this. Thank you! — WILDSTAR^TALK 03:46, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I hope phab:T293395 will be addressed soon, the logo is obviously supposed to be in the sticky header. XanonymusX (talk) 13:22, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Vector 2022 has an RFC

There is an RfC on whether Vector legacy should be restored as the default skin on the English Wikipedia. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#RfC: Should Wikipedia return to Vector 2010 as the default skin?. Thank you. InfiniteNexus (talk) 00:49, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Top bar spacing

I can't figure out why icon spacing in the top corner appears to have no consistency. See File:Vector spacing issues.png. Perhaps it was designed to only look ok if a person was crazy enough to check their notifications? Natureium (talk) 00:51, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In that screen shot, if you measure the number of pixels from the center of the bell icon to the center of the inbox, then from the center of the inbox to the center of the watchlist icon, then from the center of the watchlist icon to the center of the torso, you should see that the icons are equidistant from one another. Have you considered either reading your notifications or marking them as read? If you do not want to receive notifications, you can disable them at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:16, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Vector 2022 Post-Deployment Update from WMF team

Hi everyone,

Thank you all for your continued feedback on this project over the past four years, throughout long discussions in summer 2022, then the RfC and consensus building process, and over the past few days overall.

As some of you have mentioned, large changes and new interfaces can often generate negative reactions. We've seen that this is the norm when a major website switches to a new interface.  Immediate pushback to redesigns can often be strong, but changes in the following days and weeks. We at the Wikimedia Foundation are monitoring the reception of the skin. We know there is negative feedback coming in, and we are looking at it as one part of forming a full picture of how users are feeling about the rollout. In this message, we want to tell you how we're thinking about the rollout now and going forward.

Our research and data leading up to this deployment shows that the changes make it easier to read Wikipedia and to get started with editing. As one example, we found that the sticky Table of Contents made editors 53% more likely and readers 46% more likely to navigate across multiple sections of a page, which saves time and encourages exploration.  We developed these learnings as we deployed the skin to over 300 other language Wikipedias, where it is currently the default. The RfC process here on English Wikipedia, one of the largest in recent years, and the changes we made to the interface as a result of community thoughts in the RfC, increased our confidence that we were proceeding in the best interest and with the support of the English Wikipedia community. Many of you have spent countless hours participating in the conversations to help make the skin better – thank you!

We're sorry to hear that some of you were surprised by the change.  We used many channels to spread the word and invite people to weigh in, while also trying not to annoy people with too much communication: we used Central Notice banners to all users (displayed for weeks between May 2022 and January 2023), watchlist notices, TechNews, and the English Wikipedia Village pump.  In addition to on-wiki communications, we have also hosted bi-monthly office hours for community members on Zoom as well as on Discord, and reached out through Wikimedia groups on Telegram, Facebook, and Discord.  Before that, there were Village Pump discussions that started last July, and the first notes on the change were part of the Signpost issues in spring 2022.  Are there other places and forms of communication you think would have been helpful in this case?

Next steps

The main way we can determine the success of the new skin is with metrics. We are also watching the negative reactions on the wiki and in other parts of the internet, and it is tough to see, but we also understand that this is not the full picture. Millions of people are experiencing the new changes now but, of course, are not posting any public feedback, and it's important for us to get a sense of everyone's experience as we decide what, if any, changes to make going forward. As a clear next step, we plan on continuing to monitor key metrics to ensure the redesign is meeting its goals.  If they are not, we will take action.  Specifically, we are looking for:

• No measurable decreases in pageviews, edit rates, or account creation due to these changes
• An opt-out rate for active editors which is less than 40%
• A 10% increase to search across the site, promoting exploration of Wikipedia's content
• An increase to in-page navigation due to the new table of contents
• A decrease in scrolling to the top of the page with the purpose of using specific tools

We will be tracking these metrics weekly, and writing reports on them monthly.  We expect the first full report to be available in one month, but will probably update sooner than that with any key insights.

Besides the metrics, the incoming feedback we're seeing now is definitely important, and we're paying close attention to try to identify improvements we can make next.  We will reach out early next week with a list for you to review of quick changes we would like to make to the skin.  Changes that are already in progress include:

1. A new menu with important tools in the currently-empty right column.
2. Lowering the width at which the toggle to expand the width appears.  This will allow more people to see the toggle, even on smaller monitors and devices

We have also heard a request from many of you for persistence of the width toggle for logged-out users.  As we've mentioned before, this is a significant technical challenge from our side, but we have some ideas on how to make this happen.  We will update you on our progress next week.  

We also commit to continuing work on the desktop experience after this change is made, and into the future. This will include new feature development on the Vector 2022 skin and maintenance of the legacy Vector skin.

Please continue bringing us your thoughts and ideas on making the skin better.  You can report the issues you encountered and your suggestions for improvements at the project talk page, and we will continue to compile, analyze, and plan using it.  

We also ask you to keep testing the new skin.  We recommend that you try it out for at least a few days and give us your feedback. That said, if you prefer the old experience, you can switch back to legacy Vector or to any of our other skins at any time.  

Thank you and we look forward to working with you all to make our interfaces more welcoming and easier to use for everyone in the world. OVasileva (WMF), SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 01:27, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

So, wait a minute...the WMF is citing the statistic of * An opt-out rate for active editors which is less than 40% as being a POSITIVE?!? What you're actually saying is that (slightly less than)or(almost) 2 out of every 5 active editors or 4 out of every 10 active editors are rejecting Vector 2022. Shearonink (talk) 04:36, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, they are clearly cherry picking data to prove they are "right". It's rigged from the start. 2600:1700:1471:2550:9D6:DF7A:C8DB:4F14 (talk) 16:58, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"No measurable decreases in pageviews, edit rates, or account creation due to these changes". Plenty of us have created accounts in the past day merely to be able to change the design back to the old one. Of course those will add to the account creation rate! Mark Twain once said "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics". Statistics can be massaged to create almost any narrative. For example, are you tracking the amount of scrolling? It's very possible that the reason for increased TOC clicks is because there's now so much damned scrolling required to move down the page so people are just clicking on sections instead. This is not an improvement! (edit: and it just took me 4 edits to figure out how to insert and properly size an image, itself contributing to the latest edit counts :p) I suggest, instead of these surveys, popping up a feedback request form on, let's say, 1 out of 100 pageviews whether logged in or not. This can be much more useful than statistics that can be used as arguments for anything. IWantTheOldInterfaceBack (talk) 01:43, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hey @IWantTheOldInterfaceBack - thanks for your question. We actually tracked the amount of scrolling as part of our A/B test on the sticky header. We found that adding the sticky header decreases scrolling to the top of the page in order to use any of the tools there by 15%. I like your idea about the survey - we’re also planning on doing a similar survey a few weeks after the deployment, once people have the opportunity to get used to the new skin. OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 02:13, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Can you please actually start listening to what your community says about the importance of these statistics? Tvx1 02:17, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is not the sort of scrolling I am talking about. On a large monitor such as mine, about half the width is now taken up by whitespace. This means twice as much scrolling is required to traverse the page. Say I am on section A and it takes up my whole screen. I may now just click on the link to section B instead of scrolling all the way down to bring its start from the bottom of my screen to the top. This does not fix the core problem: that information density is half what it was before, and so more scrolling and/or clicking is required. IWantTheOldInterfaceBack (talk) 02:17, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@IWantTheOldInterfaceBack Interesting that you are talking about scrolling speed. If you want to go to a specific section you can use the ToC. Which is great that it is more accessible.

For me the point of reading is to scroll slowly and I (and most people) read faster when I don't have to move my head left-right, left-right, left-right... The text SHOULD NOT take all of the screen it should be visible all at once (full width), without moving your head. Long text makes things hard to read.

This is not just an opinion. There have been studies around that and optimal width of text is about 70 characters Readability: The Optimal Line Length, Baymard Institute, NANAVATI, A. A. et al, Optimal Line Length in Reading—a Literature Review. Visible Language, s. l., v. 39, n. 2, p. 121–145, 2005. WCAG says that if you want to meet WCAG level AAA, then the text width MUST NOT be more then 80 characters Visual Presentation: Understanding SC 1.4.8, W3C. Note how W3C and many other have constrained their width. This is true also for gov sites which try to be accessible for many e.g. random article on UK.gov, random article on NIST. Nux (talk) 00:04, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Nux: Some of us bought wide monitors for a good reason - we want to see more at once. If we want shorter lines, there's an easy solution - de-maximise the window and drag the left or right border to get the desired line length. The line length that suits me is not necessarily the same as the WMF's preferred line length, so don't assume that it is. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:54, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Redrose64 I actually have 3 monitors, so ;)... I wasn't convinced at first, but found that this is easier to read. And if you are one of those special roses of the world that prefer very long lines then you can always switch with few clicks. The option set by default is "Enable limited width mode". Studies show most of the people prefer limited width. Links for studies are above.

Take any book to your hand and note how much paper is "wasted" for margins. Do you really think publishers wouldn't want to literally cut costs by reducing margins?? Nux (talk) 19:08, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Nux:, of course you are right! But, there are many reasons and ways to view a page: I have 3 ways. Huge lemmata (who readds them..?) : I just 'fly' over them, check images, style, some words, headgings (need wide and short). Read carefully selected paragraphs: Your style! narrow, plus zoom 150%. And a medium style. Also, depends on the kind of page: huge appendices, lists etc. Wikipedia and all wikimedia projects became famous for the simplest possible design intervention. Isn't this true? Thank you Sarri.greek (talk) 19:21, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That is an invalid comparison. Books are produced in a variety of widths, and the line length is not a consequence of "we think that our readers cannot read lines longer than X" but of how much space is available once the margins have been deducted. Margins exist for at least two reasons: one is for the bookbinder, who needs space on one side for the actual binding (you don't want text right into the fold where it cannot be read) and on the other three sides for trimming (you don't want text to be cut off by a misplaced guillotine); a second is wear and tear - in use, the edges of pages do become damaged, and the existence of margins on three sides guards against damage to the actual text. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:06, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

We recommend that you try it out for at least a few days and give us your feedback. That said, if you prefer the old experience, you can switch back to legacy Vector or to any of our other skins at any time. except you've told us that our feedback doesn't matter because it's not any kind of key metric you are looking at. If we want to give feedback you'll actually observed we need to do something on the key metrics. I want to like Vector 2022 and think it's entirely possible that it will be better for our readers and new editors won't know what they're missing so it will work for them and in that sense making Vector 2022 the default will be the right decision. But it seems clear from this post that all our feedback does is make things tough for you to see. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:54, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Barkeep49 -- thanks for reading our post. I just want to underscore that the feedback definitely does matter to us. It's a key input to our work (we just didn't list it as a "metric", because it's different than a pure number that we pull from our database). As an example, the engineers are already working on a quick change to the fixed-width toggle that we heard about in many of the comments that got posted in the last two days. I'm sure you've already listed and posted it in other places, but would you mind linking me to (or re-typing) your own thoughts about the skin? I would also be interested in your thoughts on how we can best take in the specific feedback as well as get a sense of the experience of the many readers who we won't be hearing from directly. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 02:13, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Why didn’t you work on this already when this was pointed out months ago during the RFC. Tvx1 02:18, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for engaging @Marhsall. I'll start by saying I have a great deal of respect for you and have enjoyed the places we've worked together in the past. My thoughts about the skin are:

• I believe the research and stats from other wikis that say it will improve your key metrics for unregistered users
• I had committed to myself I would try it for two weeks beacuse I want to work in the environment that our readers do. And then I found tool after tool that I rely on every day wasn't going to work and even the ones that I would have thought stood some chance of getting fixed - gadgets - likely won't. So I switched back after less than a day. I've left it on for a private wiki I use because I really want to like it. But I absolutely found it unworkable for now.
• I find a UX where the same icon has different behaviors depending on where you scroll utterly bewildering.

Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 02:27, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the specifics, @Barkeep49. I hope to continue to merit your respect! You had mentioned the question of how we use feedback as part of decision-making. One thing the Web team is doing now is scanning through all the comments here on VPT and on the RfC to get a more quantitative sense of how many people are talking about the different issues. Fixed-width is obviously the big one, but there are several others that are coming up a lot.

Which icon has different behaviors? I'm looking around, but I'm not sure which one you mean. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 02:23, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

MMiller (WMF): To give one example, the torso (User menu) icon has different behavior depending on whether it is in the top header or the sticky header. I reported this as T325124, but it was closed as "works as designed". I find this UX design decision baffling. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:27, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well it appears you've elicited feedback. I've had to sign up with an account and hand you my personal information to get a usable desktop site again.

I'm sure you can imagine how this makes me feel. Redesign is utterly awful (talk) 13:30, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Redesign is utterly awful, what personal information? Creating an account requires a username and a password. — Qwerfjkltalk 18:43, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Qwerfjkl and an email address which is tied to my identity, plus cookies on my machine to uniquely identify my IP. Much is held by GDPR to be potentially sensitive. Redesign is utterly awful (talk) 10:27, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You aren't required to provide an email address to create an account yourself(though you would be unable to recover your password without one). If you requested an account, yes, that requires an email address, it is possible to create a throwaway email address. Browsers can be set to erase cookies after every use. 331dot (talk) 10:50, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

My mistake regarding email address, I imagine I didn't read enough in depth. Erasing cookies would of course defeat the point :) Redesign is utterly awful (talk) 11:50, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Really?? The “our research” nonsense again??? All of that was already debunked in the RFC, but you just keep sticking your heads in the ground? When will you actually start listening to your community?? Tvx1 02:00, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is a classic example of misleading statistics.

• The fact that people are still participating in reading/editing Wikipedia is not an endorsement of these changes and should not be interpreted as such.
• Opt-out rate in isolation means nothing; how many users would opt-in to Vector 2022? That's the number you'd need to compare it to in order to gauge support. If you bury the "I don't want to use this" button, then you can't point to the fact that not many users are pressing the button as proof of success.
• Searching more means nothing; it could just as easily be that users are having more trouble finding things. Without additional information, we don't know. You also just said that there's "No measurable decreases in pageviews", implying there hasn't been a significant increase either.

I also haven't seen any case made that these are even significantly desirable statistics. I don't really care how many times readers are searching or clicking on navigation tools, I care about whether the information on a given topic is presented adequately. This lack of transparency and this "we know best" attitude is much more of a bother than most of the technical changes, especially when presented to a community where the bedrock is user input and consensus. The changes aren't even that bad, it just needs some more work. As I've said, this was very predictable and very preventable. Village Pump and watchlists are only used by hardcore editors, which makes up a very small proportion of the users affected. Also, fix the reduced width issue. I want to see more on my screen, not less. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:02, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If you bury the "I don't want to use this" button, then you can't point to the fact that not many users are pressing the button as proof of success.

This 100%. WMF, if you want to stand behind opt-out rate as an actually useful measure of this being a good change, then put a button at the top of every page which clearly says "would you like to switch back to the old skin? Click here!" You do it for Jimmy's funding pleas, so it's clearly not a technical limitation. If, after you have that button clearly available, people still prefer the new skin, then I'll believe it's actually a good change for our users. — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 17:50, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly! I tried to switch back to the old design almost immediately, but I had to use Google and click through a ton of menus to actually find the option to opt-out. That taints any stats about the supposed number of people who don't opt out. HappyWith (talk) 22:52, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's interesting that despite all the incessant talk from the design team about usability, accessibility, welcoming design, etc, a prominent feature of the redesign is the use of mystery meat navigation. Avoiding mystery meat navigation is one of the most well-established and longest standing lessons of web design usability. I suspect that there is a combination of unacknowledged desire to keep up with the latest "trendy" design (in this case "flat" design, and the mystery meat icons provide an opportunity to showcase such design), combined with an instance of Goodhart's Law in which the statistic becomes the end in itself, forgetting that the measures exist for man, not man for the measures.

Anyway, I have a few comments on particular items that have been listed as posing technical problems.

• "We have also heard a request from many of you for persistence of the width toggle for logged-out users. As we've mentioned before, this is a significant technical challenge from our side..." How is this a challenge? All it should take is a simple cookie and a few lines of javascript. Toggling unlimited width creates a cookie. JS on each page during loading checks for the existence of such a cookie. If it exists, set body to fill the screen. If it doesn't exist, limit width to however many pixels. This can surely be done in a single-digit number of lines of code. This should not require any sort of caching at all.
• I have seen arguments that allowing non-logged-in users to select a preference for the old format is non-feasible because it would increase caching by 50%. This need not be the case. The article text itself should be the same independent of the design choice for a given pageload. Thus the article text can be cached in common for all designs. The only thing that would need to be cached separately is the non-article content and the CSS. And since, aside from the TOC side bar, this is the same for any given page, you can just cache all the non-TOC non-article content once in one common place for all pages. The only new stuff that would have to be cached is the new TOC sidebars for each page and that should only increase cache load on the order of 2 or 3 percent, not 50 percent. Conceivably, even the need to cache that 2-3% could be eliminated by including a bit of javascript in the redesign code which would, client-side, parse the page's heading structure to build a TOC from scratch. IWantTheOldInterfaceBack (talk) 02:31, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, all of this! ^

This is clearly just going to be rammed down our throats... There is no "feedback" that will be acted on, this is all a PR show to distract us long enough that they can just claim it is now a fate accompli situation, 82.9.90.69 (talk) 10:45, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The way those acceptable metric categories are worded seem quite suspicious. Increased user registration to fix problems is a good thing(dark pattern design philosophy?), a highly divisive design is still acceptable(40% is a VERY high number and easy to reach through apathy alone), having to actively search for solutions to it would be an affirmation, people should use the table of contents(?), and people not scrolling to the top. Seems those metrics were intentionally chosen to be easy to obtain or easily gamed. Deadoon (talk) 03:55, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Here the thoughts from a web developer experienced with usability and accesibility, including for blind, impaired and disabled people. I'm displeased with the change, as a regular enWiki reader and IP (non-logged) editor, but I'll try to keep calm in order to be positively critical.

First, today English Wikipedia is not a mere website: it is an institution. Worlwide. Many of us fell this change to be surprising: readers and IP editors never heard of your intentions. It was as a "Trumpist-alike assault to Congress", sorry to say. Even if all changes were good and fully debugged, which not.

Second, have in mind: every improvement implies a change, but not every change implies an improvement. I'm not against changes when they carry objetive improvements and enhancements, but this is not the case, and you know.

Third, many of you on WMF are sad with the strong words you received from many. Well, in light how you managed all the case, Didn't you expect it, really? By things like these, any outsider feel on you as in your ivory tower. Yes, it's your Wikipedia, so you do whatever you want. This way are you viewed. Studies, RFC, consensus... void words to us, if you do things this way.

This said, the main strong point of the previous UI is not aestetics: it is its solid and consistent layout. Every page in Wikipedia has the same distribution of heading, left panel and content, no matter what content: main page, articles, view history, talk, editing, templates... everything. So it is very comfortable to use. "Show preview" while editing shows exactly what you get when changes are saved. Simple, comfortable and efficent.

Now you've broken that experience: main page items are distributed centered by default (leading to the wasted space issue, in a page in which the maximum line length has no sense, it's not an article), but if you click the "three bars" button, all moves when the left side bar appears. Collapse the menu, and all moves again to be re-centered. Not a good impression, raw cooked-alike. One wonder if you really use your own product.

Open an article with TOC and you see one thing. Open an article without TOC (example: Mystery meat navigation), and you see other thing. Not consistent layout. Smells like poor tested.

About the TOC in itself, I'm not opposed it to be permanently at hand, but it should have light grey background to clear visual differentiation, and being now a tree, it has lost its numbering scheme, being hard to know at a glance where you are in the article. It tracking you all time where are you reading is an annoying flickering. Have you ever read about peripheral vision? And bad layout also, in my screen TOC does not occupy the full height, more white at left-bottom. Did you tested it in a wide range of screen sizes and resolution, really? Hard to believe.

Edit a page section, and there is no space at left (What happened with the maximum line length rule?) Write something, include some images and/or tables, etc. and "Show preview": you see one thing. Save changes and... you see a different thing. Inconsistent again, and therefore not good.

The search bar now tries to "read your mind" offering you the guessed suggestions. Before, it was a simple, quick and efficient search by title, with an "Advanced search" option. Now the search is slower, and offers less choices when the intended page starts with very common words, like "national" or "electron", lets say. As far as I tried, no "Advanced search" option (or not obvious if it has, so not a good design anyway).

The toggle button issue it's been addressing now, I know, but, Why a toggle button in first instance? It sounds as if it was a "quick-and-bugged" patch to give some kind of compromised solution to the "wasted space" issue criticism, only in order to go ahead with the maximum line width paradigm yes-or-yes. Not in your ivory tower, really, really? Plus, if you are unable to correcly put a single button on screen, May we trust in your technical skills? Please, be serious.

And incidentally, if you solved this issue with a toggle, Why not more toggles to switch between, lets say, the search bar behaviour, or any others? This would lead to make a toggle-drived Wikipedia experience, which not seems to be a good idea, I think.

And finally, the wasted space issue. The maximum line width is very objetable, even as an option, much more as the default. Personal preferences is no a matter of discussion: every one has their favourite way to enjoy the Wikipedia, and undoubtly there are people who likes more the maximum line length rule for articles but, How many? For decades I've never heard about people complain about this. People have searched, read, studied and learned with Wikipedia for years in the past, and I hope in the years to come.

I dislike that empty, blank, void space, maybe in my monitor there are more white than text, but for sure many people have 16:9 high resolution screens out there, so complains must to come. If you want to implement the maximum line width, at least limit it to the article frame, not all the page. And if you want to make it more book-alike, at least draw some borders and put a grey background, like a document in MS Word, lets say. Now, all it is a white bed sheet. Many people has visual problems with light backgrounds. Screens emits light, by now they are not ink-on-paper (reflective). RGB white light emits more high-frequency (blue) than other warm hues, and it is known it hurts the eyes. Why do you think there are people asking you a dark theme?

Yes, I'm critic. Yes, I point you issues, technical and procedural. Yes, I want a better Wikipedia. Yes, now it is no better Wikipedia. And, by now, I won't donate, sorry.

Thank you for listening me. My regards. 37.134.90.176 (talk) 11:57, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Your statistic metrics for "success" are meaningless and seem rigged to guarantee a positive result. There is virtually no scenario in where those metrics will not return a positive result given that Wikipedia has no competition. Where else are people to go? Do you really think people will just stop using Wikipedia even if they hate these changes?

This is classic lying with statistics. It doesn't at all mean that people are happy with the changes.

The best way to measure users' reactions is to ask them. Post a front page poll as a header on all pages served for the next week asking if users approve of the changes or don't approve of the changes. Obviously some effort will have to be made to prevent ballot stuffing, but it otherwise seems the best way to measure user opinion on the matter. 2600:1700:1471:2550:4102:7C99:2804:8FC3 (talk) 20:30, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In the nicest way possible, I don't think it matters what your research and data show. Wikipedia is a public service, and as such, significant changes like this one (which isn't on the same scale as page edits or changes to editing rules and policy) really should be put to public consideration. The public here is not just editors who might be slightly inconvenienced by a couple of extra clicks, or developers who think they know best, but rather ordinary users, most of whom don't use or have accounts, and many of whom will not get accounts for one reason or another. It is wrong to say to all these people "Oh well if you don't like it then make an account and change it back", because people shouldn't need an account to use this service the same way they have been using it for 12 years when there was never a mandate to change it in the first place. I am personally not a fan of the changes, but I will accept it and stop complaining if there was an approval survey asking users at large which layout they prefer. There are many conflicting opinions within the small group of people who know their way around the village pump and even know what MediaWiki is, but I highly doubt that they are representative of the opinions of the general public, who are really the ones who should be catered for here. MajorArchitect (talk) 00:50, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

As a regular reader who found the updated site design less readable with important navigational tools hidden, I was offered only the remedy of making an account to return wikipedia to a more usable state. Please don't consider account creation metrics as a vote of support in favor of this redesign. Iwant2010vector (talk) 09:42, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• There are a few things not to like at the moment:

1. the default to a narrow view, for example, although that can be altered.
2. the lack of user links in the top right - having talk, sandbox and contributions hidden in a dropdown is a backwards step for editors (although readers won't worry about it too much). If there is an option for users to decide what links can appear in the top right (and what to consign to a drop down), that would be a step forward.
3. Having those links as words, rather than icons would also be a benefit: pictures mean different things to different people, while the words Talk, Sandbox, Watchlist and Contributions are much easier to identify.
4. The 'drifting header' feature is also a pain - click from another page onto a section and the drifting header covers both the title of the section and the edit button, so on talk pages users have to scroll slightly to get the section name and edit link. This is something that should be fixed asap.
5. What can also be removed from the top of an article (one scrolling down the page), is the block of links to other languages. That's a dropdown that should be on the left (it's English WP: people are here because they speak English and don't need a link to all other languages follow them down the page. It's particularly notable given this is the only bit on the top right that appears in words (big and bold), so acts as a distraction to reading the text.
6. The bolding of sections in the left hand menu while reading an article is a complete distraction. When I'm reading and scrolling down, the bolding moves and my eye automatically looks over at it, disturbing my reading - that's very poor.

While I'm trying to like the new version (and there are some advantages to it), I'm struggling to get over the obvious downsides built into it. I can see myself reverting to the previous version shortly if this isn't improved. - SchroCat (talk) 11:43, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I very much agree with point 5, languages. (Although I'd like to see it on the right.) It makes no sense to have the languages "follow you". If you are reading it in English, you don't suddenly feel the need to change the language.

Also the drop-down menu is kinda slow to load and it makes little sense – it's weirdly shaped like an oblong rectangle and doesn't show many languages. — Jetro (talk) 22:45, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Hello OVasileva (WMF) & SGrabarczuk (WMF)! I'm generally a fan of Vector 2022 and appreciate your posting here to let us know what you're thinking. My major suggestion: work on TOC improvements as a priority. The table of contents for every page is different for a reason, and Vector 2022 automatically limits it to top-level headers only and requires the reader to click in to find lower-level section headings. This is not a good choice. We already have a template, TOC limit, that makes a human-picked, sensible choice for how many TOC levels should display. Find a way to incorporate TOC limit into Vector 2022, as it was for Vector 2010, and use that to display the "correct" number of headings in the TOC. If TOC-limit is not used on a page, display all section headings automatically, as in Vector 2010. This would be a big improvement. —Ganesha811 (talk) 12:39, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree incorporating TOC limit would be a big help. Other than that I have no complaints about the new skin and find it easier to use and better laid out on phone, tablet and desktop. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:55, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  FYI: this is tracked in phab:T317818. Does spike mean it'll be worked on? —Femke 🐦 (talk) 10:51, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I think a spike is just a ticket to brainstorm how to write a patch, how much time it would take, and weigh the pros and cons, without writing code yet. Spike (software development). Hope this helps. –Novem Linguae (talk) 17:54, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• The post from WMF people at the top of this section is typical of the condescending, patronising, arrogant comments that usually come from the WMF. "We've heard what you say, and we're sorry that you feel that what we have done isn't helpful to you, but we know better than you what will be helpful to you." Posts in response may encourage them to make some changes in detail, but there's little chance of getting them to substantially revert the changes that they have done, because experience suggests that no matter what we say, they will never admit they were wrong and revert their changes. I don't specifically know about the people who did this, but many, and I suspect most, WMF employees do very little or no editing of Wikipedia, and it never seems to occur to them that people who have significant experience of editing just possibly might know better than people who don't. JBW (talk) 13:57, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I'm kinda disappointed by this. Vector 2010 worked just fine, and yet the WMF felt that they needed to change it. Sure I've given it a chance, and yes there are some changes that I Do appreciate (mainly the "visited links" being purple), however there are some things that were completely unnecessary. The people clearly do not want it, and what do you do? You force it down our throats and basically tell us to suck it up and slam a "research" filled door in our face. We don't want this change, so stop trying to make us like it. When will you start listening to the community and doing what they want, rather than what you want? And don't just reply to this comment with something like "Oh but our research shows this is a good change." cause I'm tired of hearing that. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 14:13, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I think the failure to include unregistered readers in the "we" who need to be considered and explicit rejection of methods to consider their needs and feedback (though research) does a disservice to a large part of our community - our readers. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 16:04, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I completely agree with this point. There does seem to be a gaslighting campaign going on to try and convince people not to trust their own judgement. "You just have to give it more time. It will be fine. You'll like it in time." Etc. No, I won't. I don't like it. And I'm quite capable of making that judgement. Stop trying to gaslight me. 2600:1700:1471:2550:9D6:DF7A:C8DB:4F14 (talk) 16:33, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I'm trying to think of more than a handful of sites that ever improved after a "redesign". Instead of improving, every site seems to get worse so they can cram more ads and blank whitespace down our throats & remove all borders. Reddit, dropbox, twitter, youtube, and now Wikipedia. Revert it! Macktheknifeau (talk) 00:28, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Unfortunately, I can't think of any feedback I could possibly offer that hasn't already been offered either more eloquently or more competently. I've been using the skin (obviously - little choice on my end) and right now the main irritation is having to click 1-2 times per page to achieve what I consider a readable state. I'm not terribly thrilled to hear that next week I may be clicking 2-3 times instead (vamoosing various side menus, then width toggling). If persistence isn't possible, then... ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ Poor mouse, poor clicking finger. 199.208.172.35 (talk) 15:30, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Little trick: append «?useskin=vector» to every requested URL. Yes, poor [Ctrl-C]+[Ctrl-V] fingers... 37.134.90.176 (talk) 17:52, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I may end up enabling my browser's bookmark toolbar and using the bookmarklet thing. That'll get it down to one click. 199.208.172.35 (talk) 18:34, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I believe there are also add-ons to chrome and firefox which can add this to the end of every page that begins with "en.wikipedia.org". See for example: URL Auto Redirector (for a more simple fix) and Tampermonkey (for more complexity), both on chrome but similar exists for Firefox.

  I used to use this to make sure I always went to "smile.amazon.org" instead of "www.amazon" but that's soon to be useless. Corporations are not good to us. — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 19:02, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  That's something I might look into on my personal computer. I didn't know Amazon Smile was shutting down. Drat. 199.208.172.35 (talk) 19:38, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Options for Firefox include Redirector and FastForward. I've not tried either but can see plenty of uses beyond Wikipedia. Certes (talk) 10:58, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Thank you for this update. It's depressing that it takes a pitchfork mob on the English Wikipedia for the Wikimedia Foundation to answer an obvious question which previously went unanswered for a year: what are you trying to achieve here? How will we know that a certain version of the skin helps with the goals? Unfortunately, this collection of cherry-picked statistics cannot tell us much, because we still have no idea what the strategy is behind this entire exercise. I could comment on the individual statistics but it would be pointless. I do notice there's nothing about onboarding new users, making editing more effective or "cross-project and cross-language functionalities" (recommended by WMF's own supposed strategy). Because interfaces are a trade-off, changing things for the sake of improving some metric will inevitably worsen some other metric, so I can only assume that overall strategic goals are affected negatively by the changes. Nemo 10:39, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I think there are good arguments for the redesign - all the legibility research is that line widths being too wide makes text hard to read. There's a reason newspapers use columns. But I'd like to keep the tools on the screen constantly-having them is very good for discoverability and making it easier for people to get to know how everything works. Also, I like the hierarchy of the main article column in white and the tools off to the side in grey, I think it aids focus and could be made to work with a flat design aesthetic. (I do hear the people saying they prefer wider widths, it would be nice to have that as a custom option for people who want it, but I'm on board with the idea that a narrower column is easier to read.) Blythwood (talk) 16:58, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Inconsistent font size

There seems to be some inconsistency with the rendering of the font size in various elements on the editing page. For instance, if you go to red link example, the red "this page is protected" box and the edit summary section below the editing window have larger font sizes than anything else on the page. The same issue occurs on deleted pages, where the red "this page has been deleted" box has a larger font. Try viewing Adam Cella or any other unsalted deleted page. Anarchyte (talk) 09:35, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It seems that 'parsed wikitext' elements have 14px base font size and normal parts of the UI have 16px base font size. In the old vector this happens to be the same. And those specific areas have parsed wikitext messages which then get a different size.... I'm not sure that is as expected... Will probably have to be discussed in a ticket what the best approach is here. Thx for noticing and reporting ! —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:53, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's a known issue, I've been waiting for a fix from the team for a while: T322738. Matma Rex talk 16:32, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oh ok. Nice to know it's being looked into. Anarchyte (talk) 01:38, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Warn functionality of filters broken

According to a report at WP:EF/FP, users who receive a warning from an edit filter cannot save their changes afterward due to the "publish changes" button not being displayed in Vector 2022. I've not verified this myself, but it would be a serious accessibility issue if true, so I'm mentioning it here. —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 01:54, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Warnings from edit filters seem to be working fine, and I'm having trouble understanding that report. Probably the buttons the user needed were there, they just needed to scroll down to see them or something.

However, it's true that edit filter messages like MediaWiki:Abusefilter-warning refer to the "Publish changes" button, and there may not be such button – for example, if you got an edit filter warning while using the reply tool on a talk page like this one (there's only a "Reply" button), or if you get one while editing in visual editor (it shows a popup with two buttons, "Continue" and "Dismiss"). There are almost 50 problematic messages like this: [2]. It would be nice to rephrase them… Matma Rex talk 07:40, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Given that they mentioned the "continue" and "dismiss" buttons and later made the edit using VisualEditor, I'm guessing that was related to the problem. Then again, they claimed the "continue" and "dismiss" buttons were missing. @R. S. Shaw: can you provide more details about what you experienced? —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 15:37, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What I saw after hitting "Publish" and triggering the filter was a dialog-like box appear over the editing screen, about centered, and only filling about half the available vertical space and horizontal space. Inside the boundaries of that box was another box with heavy red outline with text from the filter. That was all that was presented (at first impression). After starting to follow the box instructions by starting creation of a False Positive report, I went back to the tab with the dialog box display and then noticed that the outer dialog box border was different on the right from the left side in that it was actually a gray scroll bar. Scrolling up, the "continue" and "dismiss" buttons appeared; this was the first I knew about them. So, the initial impression was of a double-bordered box, outer gray, inner heavy red outline with the entire message, and nothing more. If I had been aware that such buttons existed, I quite possibly would have used one of them instead of filing a FP report (although I do consider it a false positive, so I still might have). ETA: I believe a "Publish" button was present in the background, but grayed out because the dialog box had monopolized the focus. -- R. S. Shaw (talk) 19:15, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, sounds like everything is working correctly, although the display size might be smaller than ideal. —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 01:06, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Some things that should be absolute minimum requirements if the default skin is not reverted to Vector 2010

1. Make the "log in" button visible on every pageview without having to click another button first.
2. Move the full-width toggle to the top of the page. Make it persistent across multiple page loads. (the argument that persistence is technically infeasible is an obvious red herring. WMF has a $100 million endowment. You can figure out a way to make this possible. Come on.)
3. Replace all mystery meat navigation buttons with text links.
4. Fix the language selection interface. Make it alphabetical, not the convoluted monstrosity it is now.
5. Use a slightly darker background color, as in Vector 2010, for non-article-text areas to differentiate them from the article-text area.
6. As in Vector 2010, have an even slightly darker vertical line between the left sidebar and the article-text area.

IWantTheOldInterfaceBack (talk) 20:18, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@IWantTheOldInterfaceBack, this starts of somewhat reasonable and then gets excessively concerned with details. — Qwerfjkltalk 20:53, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In all honostly, regarding 2, non-fixed width should be made default again. Let readers scale their browser windows and/or screen resolutions as they wish. Tvx1 22:42, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that's why I made question 2 in the RFC. I'm trying to establish consensus around fallback options so we get something instead of nothing if the new skin is (unfortunately) not rolled back entirely. IWantTheOldInterfaceBack (talk) 02:08, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

WikEd doesn't show in Vector-2022

WikEd (:User:Cacycle/wikEd) no longer appears in the source edit window in Vector-2022. I've checked for any conflicts with the editing toolbar but can't see anything. Nthep (talk) 15:05, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Correction, found it hidden (i.e. had to scroll down) in the page top drop down menu and for some reason the deployment of Vector-2022 autodisabled the script. Nthep (talk) 15:15, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hidden? Functionality hidden in an out-of-the-way place? and not behind a new mysterious/inscrutable icon... Say it ain't so. Shearonink (talk) 14:39, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You're right, wikEd has so many inscrutable icons hiding functionality! Mystery meat doesn't even begin to describe it. Matma Rex talk 15:33, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Vector 2022 Next Steps

WMF Team:

I can understand the feedback that is being shared here and why that might seem harsh. In some sense you folks have a bit of a thankless job in this exercise. So, you have my respect for that. But, that said, this does feel like a suboptimal roll-out.

The Positives.

1. For the most part, if you forget page-to-page interaction, and just focus on a single article at a time -- There is a bit of freshness in the article pages, and the whitespace feedback notwithstanding, I think that is a positive. To be fair, there is an argument to be made that most of our visitors land at an article page from a link from a search engine and to them, this might not be a terrible experience at all.

The Negatives:

1. The mainpage is an absolute mess. The four box format that has been the homepage for over two decades now just does not fit into this modern layout at all. I wonder how that never came up in any of your design reviews. The main page should be fully redesigned to fit this new skin / visual template.
2. Lack of consistency between pages. Do this simple exercise -- start from the main page and click on a few links and see how the top margin and the left and right margins just jump around willy-nilly. That is absolutely amateurish experience that should be remedied ASAP. I had provided this feedback in one of the earlier threads and this does not seem to have been acted upon in its entirety.
3. xx Languages as the most prominent link on a page. Do this simple exercise here again -- click on a few articles and click on a few languages and see your end-to-end design experience. Absolutely broken from a design standpoint. Some go to the new skin, some go to some weird old skin -- no consistency at all. This is alright if the link is some embedded link -- but, your most prominent link throwing this broken experience is absolutely not acceptable. What drove us to include languages -- did any study indicate that readers want to read the same article on different language wikis? Does not seem so, but, if studies overwhelmingly indicate so, maybe there is an argument to be made. Also, what is the thinking behind enabling "languages" for pages in the "Wikipedia" namespace. This should be removed. I can at least understand the "languages" link for pages in the "Article" namespace. Anyway, the one positive to be had from this is -- maybe we will have editors translating more articles into the other languages.

• Pinging a few WMF members @OVasileva (WMF), SGrabarczuk (WMF), and Patafisik (WMF): Ktin (talk)

The above three negatives should be fixed ASAP. Please pardon my saying this -- this has been a suboptimal roll-out. Let's fix this. Tagging some of the WMF users driving this project Ktin (talk) 20:45, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

1. this is up to the local community, not to the software maintainers and/or designers

2. this has to do with wether or not a table of contents is needed for a page or not. I do feel there is a point for improvement here, though I'm not sure how...

3. "Some go to the new skin, some go to some weird old skin" This is mostly a temporary thing. It takes a while to get everything switched over. "What drove us to include languages " mostly a desire to promote the wikis of other languages. This has been a consistent point throughout feedback over the last couple of years. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:55, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your response.

Re: #1 -- The end reader does not differentiate between WMF and the "local community". They would want a consistent design experience. Period. The mainpage as it stands right now is not of the same design framework as the skin / new design template and that needs to be fixed ASAP.

Re: #2 -- Not sure if we are speaking two different things. Do a simple exercise. Start from the main page and visually track the top margin of the article page and the left and right margins. See how they bounce around. A simple fix should be there should be no bouncing around of margins as you click between pages. I am not as worried about the whitespace.

Re: #3 -- Desire to promote wikis of other languages -- is absolutely fine. That's what I have noted as the positive impact of this change. But, the experience right now is broken visually. Also, a simple fix is to remove the languages link from non article pages. For e.g. Do you really want to go to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) in 74 languages? Ktin (talk) 21:01, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Your number one is puzzling. We have had a 4 box structure on the main page since 800x600 was the resolution used for monitors. It was explicitly designed by English Wikipedians for the size at which it now displays (which is actually larger, at 960px). Izno (talk) 20:59, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I am saying that the four box structure is not consistent with the new Vector 2022 design. Take that for what it is. If you disagree, that is perfectly fine. Ktin (talk) 21:03, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, so I think then your complaint is that it's got boxes that are pastel colors. That's true, and I agree with the complaint :), but that's a complaint that's got nothing to do with Vector 2022. It wasn't any better under Monobook or Vector 2010. Izno (talk) 21:07, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If it is only the color palette, I think that might be an easier fix. I think the problem is that we have moved away from the notion of "boxes" as a design element (which has been the case in all prior WP design iterations) to one which does not have boxes but just horizontal lines as demarcations and plain whitespace. While this is definitely fresh -- the main page view of four boxes is not consistent with that design view. Ktin (talk) 21:23, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

all? :) I use Timeless and there is a distinct lack of borders for boxes, and then there is also Minerva, which also is largely "borderless" and which serves our mobile community since a decade ago. Even Modern has a lack of distinctly colored borders, and that's nearly as old as Monobook. Anyway, yes, the skins do have differing opinions on how much border to serve a human.

But in the rest of our wiki, we do have many other things that retain their borders, such as standard wikitable as well as {{infobox}}es, {{navbox}}es, and myriad other "content structure" items. The main page is thus not really inconsistent with the wider design of editor-driven content (besides the pastels).

Otherwise, I agree with TheDJ that the main page is not something that upstream can or will or should attempt to fix. It's solely in the realm of editors. I've already had to reiterate to upstream just this week about how sensitive English Wikipedia is to main page design changes. Izno (talk) 21:32, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Now, that this passage has been moved into the middle of this wall of text, I hold no hope that this passage would get any visibility among those that matter (and I do not mean that as disrespect to you). Fwiw -- I still strongly believe that the mainpage four box layout does not fit Vector2022 since we have gone away from boxes as means to structure an article page between the legacy vector and Vector 2022. Your point on Monobook or Minerva etc might be correct, but, I am going to stick my neck out and make a claim that most readers were on legacy Vector (not on Monobook or Minerva)^{[citation needed]} and now moving to this skin presents a differing experience between the main page and the articles, which is not good. Agree with the point on colors as well, but, this is more than that. I think we can agree to disagree here. Let's leave it at that. Re: Mainpage design being the realm of the community vs WMF (or upstream as you call it), I think that is perfectly alright. But, if upstream does a change, downstream needs to reflect appropriately and the two should move together. Else, we will have a fractured experience.

With that, I think I will stand down @Izno:. Ktin (talk) 00:06, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Ktin, mobile serves 63% of our page views, which means the vast majority of readers see Minerva. It is hard for me to see that as the minority of readers. ;) Izno (talk) 00:15, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How can I remove suggested languages?

On the top right corner, I have some kind of language selector. How can I remove suggested languages or change the order of languages? For some reason, the first language suggested is Russian, which I don't understand. How do you remove that and some other languages from the list of suggested languages? In English wikipedia, the first suggested language should be my first language whatever that is (e.g. Swedish, Norwegian, Japanese).

Even better would be that I could choose myself which languages are important to me. That list would be short, perhaps 3 or 4 languages. Currect list of suggested languages seems to be about 10 languages and that is too much. 2001:14BA:2BF7:F700:A3E7:1EC2:AD07:5BA1 (talk) 22:32, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

2001 - if you create an account you could use a userscript to set display:none; on the element #p-lang-btn. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:18, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have an account, but I can't find a way to remove suggested languages even if I'm logged in.

Usually, I'm using wikipedia logged-out. I think that is the usual way to read wikipedia. You should be able to edit the language list without logging in. 2001:14BA:2BF7:F700:115C:F0A2:E963:C9D2 (talk) 15:34, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

At one point, at least if you were logged in, the list of suggested languages kept track of things like which languages you've used most recently. I don't recall hearing that this had been disabled, so it probably still works.

@Amire80, I suspect you will know the answer off the top of your head. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:09, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

.... also by logging in you can choose what languages the system prefers to serve you with the WP:Babel series of user boxes, as far as I understand.

My understanding is that if you don't explicitly opt in in that way, the system tries to guess based on your IP. Since your IP geolocates to Helsinki, Finland, I would guess that's why Russian is showing up. That seems like a miss either way since while Finnish is Baltic, it's not Russian, so there's maybe a valid bug in that regard. (I know that the education system in Finland has emphasized Swedish and English most recently for other languages.) Izno (talk) 00:22, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I was right, it is based on IP. Here's the FAQ. I have no idea where to go from there to see if Russian is expected to be near the top of the chain. Izno (talk) 00:59, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The system should not suggest languages based on location unless the language is an official language in the region. English can be suggested always, because it is probably the largest wikipedia. In Finland (when using English Wikipedia), the system should suggest Finnish and Swedish and perhaps Sami languages. If the reader has used any other languages often, those can be added to the suggested languages. 2001:14BA:2BF7:F700:115C:F0A2:E963:C9D2 (talk) 15:40, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Swedish is not on “other” language in Finland. Finland is a bilingual country with Swedish being one of its two official languages. Tvx1 16:38, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Take out buttons from top left and slightly dimming side space

This new skin is nice. But problem I have is that all buttons like sandbox, watchlist, user talk etc need an extra click then previous skin. How to add that buttons on right side. and one more thing how to make that side space slight yellowish-white. Parnaval (talk) 20:21, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, last day, while editing on 2010 Wikitext editor, I was clicking on white area at the bottom of all wikitext, to add content there. It turns out that that particular area was beyond the editing box, and I should've clicked a little above to bring the cursor there. There should be a subtle color difference and/or border between article-text/wikitext area and the rest of whitespace to demarcate them. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 20:33, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sudden vector-2022 update?

Is it just me, or the "Tools" menu, and "General","Import/export","In other projects" moved to the right sidebar? —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 21:16, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

They probably deployed it earlier than planned, based on some feedback. Was always going to arrive this or next week though. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:23, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

As stated at Wikipedia:Vector 2022#A very brief timeline This change has been set to happen on the Week of January 23, 2023 since before the skin was deployed wednesday last week. Terasail^[✉️] 21:27, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

User contributions page breakage

Interface of Special:Contributions/CX_Zoom is also broken, all of a sudden. Windows 11, latest version of MS Edge. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 21:22, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Added a screenshot. This occurs with or without hiding the tools menu. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 21:28, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see that, the only issues I have with the tools sidebar is the Atom link is over the icon and the edit interlanguage links link isn't well formatted. Terasail^[✉️] 21:38, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I wondered if it is some script doing these, but then I used safemode and it still shows up like this. Idk somethingis wrong with whatever they did. It was all fine 1 hour ago. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 21:41, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I filed this as phab:T327715 Seems a conflict with the content translation beta. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:45, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hey @CX Zoom, @TheDJ, @Terasail - thanks for reporting! We're looking into this right now and hope to have a quick fix by the end of the day/first thing tomorrow. OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 22:31, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Vector 2022 Contributions bug

This is what my contributions page looks like in all browsers (upt-to-date):

Coldbolt (talk) 10:59, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Coldbolt: Does this also happen on https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributions&target=Coldbolt&safemode=1 (using safemode)? --Malyacko (talk) 11:29, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Malyacko: Unfortunately, yes. I'm trying to figure out what the problem is but I haven't found a solution yet. Coldbolt (talk) 12:11, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Update: It is a 100% Vector 2022 bug because the problem doesn't exist with Vector 2010. I hope someone from the tech team can pick this up. @SGrabarczuk (WMF): Coldbolt (talk) 12:15, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Coldbolt Already covered above with phab tracking. — 🍊 Paper9oll 🍊 (🔔 • 📝) 12:24, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks I see! Coldbolt (talk) 12:27, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Teeny text column on a laptop

I was just working on Jane Austen and it suddenly shrunk down to nothing!! Now the infobox and the two columns w/ tools appear wider than the lead text. This is 100% (not zoomed), 13 inch screen, set at 1280. Not an improvement. Victoria (tk) 21:50, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Some options until the WMF cleans up a variety of whitespace and font size problems are to switch back to Vector 2010 (Preferences -> Appearance -> Vector 2010 -> Save), hide the Tools sidebar (which will make it move to a menu at the upper left), or customize your vector-2022.css file (scary if you are not a geek). – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:08, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Jonesey95, I've hidden the tool bar but it seems to need hiding w/ every page refresh, plus the other issues mentioned in this thread. I know I can change back, but have been giving V22 a test drive. There are some things I like about it and I've spent the past few days trying to get my eyes used to it. I posted the screenshot so the devs can see what a random laptop user who doesn't have access to prefs etc sees. It's not great. Pinging AHollender (WMF). Is this what you all have in mind for MacBook users? Victoria (tk) 22:21, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If you collapse any menu, then it should save when you refresh the page. If your connection is being slow or you are expanding it in another tab there's a chance it's not working as expected. Can you try collapsing it, waiting 5 seconds then hard refresh the page? If this is still happening let me know and I'll look into this more first thing tomorrow. Jdlrobson (talk) 01:33, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Jdlrobson, thanks for the reply. Yes, it's more persistent now than it was. But it seems to depend on namespace. I.e if I have everything collapsed (including TOC) to get a decently sized text column, that doesn't persist from article to article. Furthermore, edit mode is full width (which is really really nice!), but preview isn't persistently in full width - I just ran into that on Maxfield Parrish where I was moving around images - some of the previews were in full width w/out TOC, others w/ TOC and w/ the narrow text column.

But all that aside, the biggest concern is that on a laptop the text column is absurdly small (I've since changed screen res to 1440, but w/out much effect); the infoboxes are huge and images are squashing out text. I have the luxury to set preferences, to fiddle, and to play with to get it right. A casual reader logged out reader won't. Victoria (tk) 01:50, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Adding, in this edit the edit window was the size of the small text column, though TOC and tools were collapsed. As I'm typing this the edit window is the width of the screen. So the sizing isn't persistent. Victoria (tk) 02:10, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The preview not being in full width is a known bug, T322385. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:30, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Atom link icon problem

The icon next to the atom link overlaps with the link itself. This happens on pages that have feeds, like user contribution pages etc. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:51, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ah I see that I wrote a duplicate phab ticket as you... I also reported the atom issue along with edit interlanguage links formatting that I am seeing phab:T327719 Terasail^[✉️] 21:55, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If you want a temp fix, add #feed-atom { background-image: none; } to Special:Mypage/vector-2022.css --Chris 22:41, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A new menu in the Vector 2022 skin

A bit more details, as well as more upcoming changes are available in this post on the RfC page.

Hey everyone,

Thank you all for continuing the conversation on the new skin and reporting thoughts, issues, and bugs as you come across them. Today, the new page tools menu was deployed to the Vector 2022 skin for logged-in users. This menu allows for a separation between navigation that is related to the entire wiki (Main page, random page, etc) and tools that are related to a specific page (what links here, related changes, cite this page, etc). It also collects all page-specific tools in a single menu, rather than splitting them between the main menu and the more menu. More information is available on the project page. Moving this menu to the right side of the page has the benefit of showing the table of contents further up the page without requiring people to scroll down to see the table of contents. We’ve noticed that this is one of the concerns we’ve been hearing over the last couple of days and hope this addresses it.

Let us know if you have any questions or experience issues with the tools menu. Thank you @CX Zoom, TheDJ, and Terasail: for reporting the menu doesn’t work with the Content Translation beta feature on the Contributions page - a quick fix for this will be available tomorrow morning. In a few weeks, we also plan to make the pinned menu sticky, just as the Table of Contents and the left menu.

We’ll keep updating here as well as changes and fixes are made over the next couple of weeks. Thank you! OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 00:44, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The new tools menu appears to be creating a bug for me on some disambiguation pages, eg. ¿Dónde está Elisa?, where a large black space appears matching the vertical space taken up by the "Actions" tools. It does not appear on incognito, which suggests it relates to the tools. It also does not appear for every disambiguation page, as far as I can tell it appears on shorter disambiguation pages, pages like French are unaffected. CMD (talk) 05:05, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Did you mean a "large blank space"? If so, this is T327714. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:30, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That's right, thank you, that Phab is exactly it. CMD (talk) 09:57, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Preview broken on 2017 wikitext editor

Preview on template (Infobox person)

Preview on article (today's featured article)

Preview is currently broken when editing using 2017 wikitext editor (I don't edit using 2010 wikitext editor because it lacks keyboard shortcuts which is required for my day-to-day editing of which I got so used to using keyboard shortcuts (embed into my mind) that I can no longer move away from). I have tested with or without safemode on various namespace (main, talk, template), both yields the same results where the entire page content would be flushed entirely to the right side of the screen, leaving a huge chunk of whitespace on the left. — 🍊 Paper9oll 🍊 (🔔 • 📝) 07:13, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Update: This issue is caused due to the coding changing to use rubbish CSS grid instead. Forcing .mw-body to use display: block!important fixed it but is rather a makeshift fix only which of course requires editor that uses 2017 wikitext editor to add the css styling to their common.css. — 🍊 Paper9oll 🍊 (🔔 • 📝) 12:20, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Vector 2022 bug: Interlanguage links misuse the 'lang' attribute

Hi, I'd like to report a bug with interlanguage links in Vector 2022. In the new skin, each of the links includes a 'lang' attribute indicating the language of the link's destination (e.g. the HTML for a link to Chinese Wikipedia looks like this: <a class="autonym" dir="ltr" href="https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/..." title="... – 中文" lang="zh">Chinese</a>).

This is incorrect use of the 'lang' attribute. The 'lang' attribute is for indicating the language of the element's contents (i.e. the link text), not for indicating the language of a link target. Because the link text is written in English (e.g. the links are labeled "Spanish" and "Chinese", not "español" and "中文"), the 'lang' attribute should not be present. There is sadly no standardized way to indicate the language of a link target (although this W3C post suggests the 'hreflang' attribute as a possibility).

This incorrect use causes display issues, as some browsers use the 'lang' attribute to decide which font to use. I've included a screenshot showing how the words "Chinese" and "Korean" are in a different font to the rest of the page. This is because my browser (Firefox 109.0 on Ubuntu 22.04.1) uses a different font to render Chinese and Korean text, and the 'lang' attribute is causing my browser to incorrectly believe those words are written in Chinese and Korean respectively.

I recommend removing these 'lang' attributes, or perhaps changing them to be 'hreflang' attributes. Thanks, IagoQnsi (talk) 23:30, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@IagoQnsi: The language names are displayed in the corresponding language by default. I guess you have enabled "SidebarTranslate: display sidebar language links in English" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. You can post a request at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-SidebarTranslate.js but it may be considered low priority when it's just an English Wikipedia opt-in gadget for registered users. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:52, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, didn't realize I had such a gadget enabled. I will report it over there, thanks. –IagoQnsi (talk) 23:55, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@IagoQnsi: The hreflang= attribute is documented with the a alement. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 00:16, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Redrose64: Oh neat, I didn't realize it was actually part of the standard. Maybe hreflang attributes should be added to Vector 2022 then. –IagoQnsi (talk) 00:18, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's been part of the HTML standard since HTML 4.0, that is, for the last 25 years. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 00:23, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

So, I think the RR and PH have solved that issue.

I've filed phab:T327591 because the fact that ULS does not provide hreflang for its target links is halfway to a bug given the component of interest. Izno (talk) 00:39, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Vector 2020 left side toolbar not sticky

Should it not be sticky? (like the ToC) · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 10:00, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There's a task for this. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 10:14, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"Clear the watchlist"

In Vector22, at the top of the watchlist, you now have four menu items, with the rightmost one being "clear the watchlist". I presume this simply removes all entries from your watchlist? This option isn't mentioned at Help:Watchlist. Please, please, can someone confirm that there is some "are you very very sure" intermediate screen when one clicks this? It seems like a terrible thing to have so prominent anyway, but it would be rather disastrous if it worked instantaneously. (Oh, and I get a timeout when I try "View and edit watchlist", not good...). By the way, the "help" button at the right of Watchlist doesn't take you to "Help:Watchlist", a bit weird that, but that's the same in the good Vector. Fram (talk) 09:51, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, there is an interstitial "Are you really sure?". This link has also been present at Special:EditWatchlist for some time.

Not actually a Vector 22-specific change surprisingly, it also applies in Minerva and was done firstly to enable advanced mobile editing. See phab:T316818 for discussion.

The timeout is common for large watchlists and there's a batch of other tasks hanging out about how to resolve that longterm if you want to go Phabricator diving (you probably don't).

That help link being about the filters makes me :|. Not sure about who to bug about that one. Izno (talk) 10:19, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. A very rarely needed option which doesn't belong there but in some dropdown probably, but at least it has the safety built-in. And no, I try to stay away from phabricator at all costs, a toxic environment if ever I saw one (the treatment of non-incrowd members is terrible). Fram (talk) 10:25, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

For what it's worth the non-javascript watchlist in monobook and vector also has these links, when the javascript watchlist was rolled out they were put behind the edit button; as there is a confirm prompt required to clear the watchlist I don't think we need to do anything now. @Fram: I added some documentation to Help:Watchlist#Clearing the watchlist. If your watchlist is very large, I suggest you try to trim it using the /raw mode; load that - copy everything to a local file, sort, trim, paste back in to replace everything in there. (Note - there is no server history accessible for watchlists, so any changes you commit can not be undone). Anything else you need on this? — xaosflux ^Talk 15:31, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm giving the new skin a college try but one thing that's non-negotiable is removing the direct link to My Contributions in the top-right corner. I used that as a quick way to reach my active/recent discussions so hiding it in the sub-menu is an extra click for no reason. Is there any way to customize which buttons appear directly (currently, it's Userpage, alerts, notices, watchlist) and which ones get hidden in the sub-menu? Slightly less important but still annoying is that I have the UTCLiveClock gadget active (Preferences > Gadgets > Appearance, 2nd one in the list) and that's getting hidden in the sub-menu as well. Is there any way to change this? I don't mind having extra buttons on the top-right of my screen. Axem Titanium (talk) 01:36, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Axem Titanium for that clock gadget, see Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Gadget_updates? above. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:42, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Note, phab:T302641 is an open feature request to put more thing, including contributions, back in to what is now called 'vector-user-links'. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:04, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks xaosflux for pointing me to those two threads. Since it seems there's no option to change it at the moment and quick access to contribs is too important for my UX, I'll be switching back to Vector 2010 for now. I look forward to trying the new Vector 2022 when these two features are (re)implemented. Axem Titanium (talk) 04:01, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I also found the contributions link quite handy at times, but for me an extra click is no big deal. Being able to customise the buttons as suggested above would be nice, though probably only a few would use the feature, However the power users tend to be set in our ways and do not like useful features to be removed so we waste our time complaining when there is useful work to be done. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 10:05, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've managed to move it with this code: $("#pt-mycontris").insertAfter("#pt-watchlist-2"); (added to your skin.js file). It doesn't work with the magical mystical appearing/disappearing toolbar, but that seems pretty useless anyway. As such, it restores the contribs link to the top of the page and is at least no worse than the old style. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 21:17, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Zzuuzz got a quick hack to have this "copy" the node instead of "move" it? — xaosflux ^Talk 01:20, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Xaosflux: I haven't looked very closely. There is another element #pt-mycontris-sticky-header, but I'm not sure what that is. Anyway, you can use $("#pt-mycontris").clone().insertAfter("#pt-watchlist-2"); to create a clone. To change IDs, you probably need 3 lines - a first draft looks like this: var contrib_clone = $("#pt-mycontris").clone(); contrib_clone.attr("id", "pt-mycontris-copy"); $("#pt-watchlist-2").after(contrib_clone); -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 02:09, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Zzuuzz: thanks for the note. Building from that, got this that may help User:Axem Titanium and others:

• In Special:MyPage/vector-2022.js put:

/*Add contributions link to the top of the page */
$("#pt-mycontris").insertAfter("#pt-watchlist-2");

• In Special:MyPage/vector-2022.css put:

/* Hide menu icon from Contributions link that has been moved in my vector-2022.js file */
.mw-ui-icon-userContributions 
	{display:none;}

There is still a little too much padding around that element, but it is using flex layout so is a pain to deal with consistently and probably not worth it (such as using negative margins, recalculating the width, etc). Anyone else got improvements for this? — xaosflux ^Talk 14:17, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Nice job! If contribs could be added to the magical floating toolbar as well, that would be the first big workflow improvement over Vector 2010 for me. Axem Titanium (talk) 21:17, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Axem Titanium you could use the same and insert it after #ca-watchstar-sticky-header to put it there, but it's prob better if this gets improved and "clones" the element to those places instead of just "moving" it. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:09, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for this, xaosflux. Would it be possible to hide the "Contributions" text and keep the icon in the header instead? I think it'd look cleaner, given everything else is iconified now. Anarchyte (talk) 01:34, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Anarchyte not as reliably, perhaps with some more javascript. The element with the word on it doesn't have an id to just target with css. I expect this can be done, basically by using javascript to not just "move" the link as we did above, but instead to create and insert an entirely novel element for it. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:46, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe a "experiment" gadget?

The 'move' idea works, but just creating a new object seems to be better for this. Perhaps we can put up a gadget demo to add the popular "(MY) Contributions" and (MY Usertalk)" links back to the top. It won't be future proof if the skin people keep moving things, but shouldn't be too hard. Started messing around in Special:PermaLink/1134871225. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:37, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's probably a good idea. Personally I'll be slowly working towards restoring all the text links I had before, and removing all the picture icons. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 20:03, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Just a quick note so y'all can apportion blame properly:

The Editing team is planning some changes. These will only be visible to people who have enabled the "DiscussionTools" Beta Feature. If you see them, and don't like them, they can all be turned off in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion (last item, "Show discussion activity").

The upcoming changes that you should blame on the Editing team, rather than on the Web team, are:

• The discussion activity items that are currently visible in Talk: and User_talk: namespaces only will finally be enabled in other talk namespaces, but not in any even-numbered namespaces (e.g., the namespace this page is in).
• The old [reply] button will become a Reply button. This is because it's easier for brand-new editors to figure out what a button is. You'll still be able to re-style it, but if you're using the old script to change it, it'll probably need to be updated.
• [Later] They're going to add an extra "Add topic" button, so you don't have to scroll all the way back up to the top of the page to start a new section. For Vector 2022 only, this will be in its sticky header. (For all the other skins, I believe it will be at the very bottom of the page, which I guess doesn't help much if you're exactly in the middle.)
• [Later] They're going to add a line at the top of the page, under the =Page title=, that says how long it's been since the last signed comment ("Yesterday, in the kitchen with the knife, by WhatamIdoing"). This may not be helpful on this page (and won't appear here), but it should make it easier to spot whether there are any recent conversations on a more average talk page.

Pretty much all the other visible changes this month should be blamed on my teammate Szymon. ;-)

What might be useful for Editing to hear from this group in particular is:

• How should the software detect whether a talk page in a non-talk namespace (e.g., Help: or Wikipedia:) is the right sort of place for a discussion? If you have ideas about a reliable heuristic, I'm sure that they would be happy to hear them.

Thanks, all. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:39, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Is it just me or is the way that this message is worded crazy? It reads a bit like something I might post and I had to read it twice. First time I was being overwhelmed by who is blaming who? And then once to realise that this is just an annoucement of changes being made as part of mw:Talk pages project... Bit of a wild message and not the most constructive way to ask for feedback if you ask me. Terasail^[✉️] 13:00, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It reads like humorous sarcasm that was also missed on me, until i saw the winking emoticon. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 14:11, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

WMF accounts should avoid inserting humour into valid updates for communities. It will often miss and come off as some "in joke" between staff. Being clear and concise is the best way to inform people of changes but insering humour both extends the message making it less concise as well as making it less clear what the goal of posting the message is. Terasail^[✉️] 15:42, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Terasail: It's about an upcoming interface change. Such changes always provoke posts on this (and other) pages along the lines of "I don't like it, change it back at once. Then fire the developers who foisted this on us without asking first." --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:43, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Redrose64 While true, I run into the issue that this reads more like a "Go ahead and start complaining now at the editing team but just make sure you don't towards the web team" rather than anything particularly constructive. If the message trimmed all this finger pointing (Insert spiderman meme) that would be one thing, but it just doesn't read well for me. This would also be better if the message linked to the actual mediawiki pages which contain the explanations of each feature rather than giving long descriptions here along with coordinating some update through tech news. Terasail^[✉️] 15:40, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately for Whatamidoing (WMF), most of us view the WMF as one big entity and do not distinguish among the teams. I can't remember ever singling out one person at WMF for criticism (if I have done so, I was probably wrong to do it), but I have leveled plenty of criticism at the organization as a whole. I know from working in large bureaucracies that many well-meaning, helpful, intelligent, and dedicated individuals can exist within an organization that often makes large errors on a regular basis. Although I think the above inter-departmental jabs were intended as humor, WMF employees would do well to remember that when the WMF does something, the WMF as a whole gets the credit or the blame, and Wikipedians generally don't care about the internal politics. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:01, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The regulars on this page usually care about getting their feedback, in the most efficient manner possible, to the people who can fix the problems. These are the upcoming changes that folks should complain to the Editing team about (or ping me). If it's not on this list, you probably need to contact the Web team (or ping Szymon).

I'd hoped that these changes would go out last month, to avoid this potential for confusion, but there were delays on our end, so here we are. This is your cheatsheet for which team is causing which change.

And Redrose is right, at least about someone disliking any given change and someone saying that nobody was ever asked (e.g., in the multi-month massive consultation that started this project) or informed (e.g., in Tech/News and here). There are 123,503 registered editors here at the moment. Of course some people aren't going to see these announcements. (In 2013, my team ran high-volume CentralNotice banners for two weeks about the deployment of the visual editor, and I remember someone saying that they'd missed all the banners due to being on holiday for those exact 14 days.) Of course someone's going to dislike some of these changes. Of course someone's going to dislike all of these changes. It would be patently unreasonable of me to expect that many people to agree on any UI or design point. This is normal and expected. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:46, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I also wanted to note I liked the humour and appreciated Whatamidoing (WMF)'s post. The "add topic" will be nice, other than my non-use of V22, so perhaps will be nice for others? I will endeavour to make sure WAID is the last up against the wall when the mob comes. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:44, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've heard The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series), but I've never read the book. I'm open to advice on whether I should, especially if anyone's familiar with both. I figure that the movie is always worse than the original book, but could the book be better than the radio show? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Whatamidoing, I've heard/read both. I'd say they're about the same, though the books might be a bit better. — Qwerfjkltalk 21:00, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Whatamidoing (WMF): The first book and the first radio series (six episodes) were written at the same time, there is a lot of discrepancy between the two. A number of plot elements that only appeared in the book did go on to appear in the later radio series, and vice versa. The last three radio series were made much later than the last of the five books, and do serve to clear up some of the discrepancies. It's probably best to read the books first, then listen to all 26 radio episodes, then read the books again. Repeat as necessary. Do not use our articles as a preview for either, except perhaps to look up the cast. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:34, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

FTR I appreciated the humor, and didn't think it was too much. Chris 12:42, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, but this is a dangerous venue for humour. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk):

Whatamidoing (WMF), you may borrow the divers' motto - "Semper in stercore, sed profunditas variat" ;-) Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 10:23, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Since it's been really wet here for the last few weeks, "always in the muck" might be a little on the nose this month. It's all sunshine today, though, and the water districts are reminding us that there's still plenty of opportunity to end up with a drought and water restrictions come summer. (My own neighborhood's fine, but I know people who have a mess to clean up. The only mess I have to clean up is washing my rainboots. I decided last week to give up on that until it was over.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:39, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Reply link now a link without square brackets on talk pages

I don't have an issue with it but don't recall there being any notification that they might be doing this. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 21:07, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

See #Talk page appearance above. — MusikAnimal ^talk 21:22, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a long discussion about it. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:48, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]