Talk:Learning and Evaluation/Archive/Boiler room/Portal Redesign Plan

Library rename

"Library" could be renamed to something that more closely resembles what it does, like "Learning resources" or "Evaluation classroom", etc... (Edward)

I think Learning Resources but I am not sure it includes the active user who may contribute to the library via case study or learning pattern or other resources JAnstee (WMF) (talk)

Other ideas: Learning Center, Learning collection, Collective archive, Collective Resources, Concurring Library. MCruz (WMF) (talk) 00:00, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Category cross-over

Need to include question bank to library and tools pages.JAnstee (WMF) (talk)

Boiler Room rename

What to rename the boiler room and forge - I suggest Drafting Room for the boiler room and no more forge... whatever that was JAnstee (WMF) (talk)

Parlor rename?

How about the parlor, would something like cafe or hub work better? JAnstee (WMF) (talk)

I like Cafe! This word is used in some Wikipedias for conversation sections, like French Wikipedia and Spanish Wikipedia. MCruz (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

What about "Community"? Seems to be a common term for other open source sites --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 20:30, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

Moving Glossary to higher-level of navigation

I think that the glossary should either be it's own tab or at least raised to it's own heading level rather than hidden in other resources. JAnstee (WMF) (talk) 20:10, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

Edward's general design thought

A unique identifier that is simple and easy to put into any page, like the IdeaLab kitty square.

I support this. It could be a version of the wheel and duck. I think this is specially good idea for interactions part of the portal. --MCruz (WMF) (talk)

Navigation

The current page has lineal reading (from top to bottom), and repeated titles. It is very much centered on a menu logic. I would suggest getting rid of the menu in the landing page, and turn that into modules.

• Reference: Grants:Start
• What would go here? Library / Tools / Parlor / News.

Show previews of each section on the modules. --MCruz (WMF) (talk)

User interaction

Bring forward all the ways in which users can interact with the portal.

• Reference: IdeaLab portal, IEG portal
• What would go here? Find or endorse a Learning Pattern / Learn from our case studies / Find step-by-step tutorials on WikiMetrics and more / Discuss Program Evaluation and Metrics.

This could be curated according to specific interests. Not everything has to go here. (For instance, right now we are promoting the community dialogue.) A good idea could be to develop icons for each of these sections. It could be a new version of the duck + wheels.

• References:

• Learning pattern.
• IdeaLab portal

--MCruz (WMF) (talk)

Graphic Identity

This topic intends to give support to other issues raised above. I think it would be a good idea to strengthen the current visual identity, by:

• Making more variations of the logo to identify the following sections: community dialogue, learning patterns, tools, case studies.

I think these are the key sections we want to highlight. Please feel free to make corrections or add new ones! --MCruz (WMF) (talk)

• Picking specific colors:

dark gray

light brown

blue

• Perhaps we can choose 5? --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 17:21, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

dark gray

light brown

blue

thistle

medium sea green

Please don't abuse colors (notably non contrasting ones where text and background are nearly the same light intensity; you should always have at least 50% of lightness difference, except for thin border lines and frames whose contrast whoud be lower, with about 33% of light difference over the background, to not obscure too much the rest of the text). This does not mean that everything must be grey or metalic blue and boring. But visual identity should not come from colors.. Colored text is generally a bad idea, notably when you create "patchworks" that are not accessible. font sizes and thin borders plus some descriptive icons (augmented wih alternative description labels) are frequently better. Yo ucan still illustrate an article, but don't mix that with text.

And please don't assume only MacOS fonts in your CSS, don't forget the "serif" or "sans-serif" default fonts... verdy_p (talk) 16:20, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

"Parlor" design

There are over 100 people in the facebook group and having a paragraph about each person is probably too much since we expect it to grow. The social page should be more of a list or gallery of faces that includes names, country, affiliations, that can be sorted by program/org affiliation (GLAM, WEP, Wiki Loves Monuments, Chapters, etc.). This might help people easier identify who they can/should be connecting with on/off wiki.

Next steps

Revisit: June 24-26

• Create a Sitemap: Survey all the content in the site and define what categories they belong to.
• Define priorities --> what is the most important thing to tackle?
• Figure out how to collaborate with translations.
• Begin to design/plan the "look and feel"
• Curate content we want to bring forward

• Build the new pages of the portal on smbd's sandbox. (In order to avoid live changes.)

"Hot off the presses..."

"Hot of the presses" might not be easily translated or interpreted accurately. I think we should change to "News" or "New in Evaluation" --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 16:41, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

Broken redirects, red links, accessibility, translatability...

I've passed some time to fix all multiple redirects that did not go nowhere since pages were moved (multiple times) by the WMF staff from "Programs:" to "Grants:" (many of them without leving redirects or creating double/triple redirects or more, or sometimes redirect loops.

I cannot cleanup all the superfluous links that may remain, but at least they should point to the new locations. But I've not checked all these broken links.

At the same time I've tried to reduce the need for using TNT and TNTN in pages (TNTN can now be used internally in templates to autodetect when it is needed. This simplifies the syntax for reusing many templates.

Beware when renaming pages: don't forget to check the list of pages referencing them, do not rename these pages again before you've resolved all double redirects. We should have a bot account to fix all double redirects before continuing. Be vareful when you rename pages with the Translate extension: they move them without leaving redirects, and it's sometimes hard to fix the red links as we have to look in page history to find where they were before, and then fix the other pages that were referencing them.

Our "social" pages (talk pages, parlor, comment buttons, self-presentations, etc.) are working again as well as common navigation headers.

• If you find pages where links no longer work, and that I've not fixed signal them (often we need more than just fixing redirects).
• f you find pages with broken RTL layouts (Arabic, Hebrew...) or pages mixing languages or assuming a different language, this is sometimes complex (notably when a translated page does not use the "/lang" suffix but uses a translated page name. Ask or help here, this is not very easy to manage.
  In general, we should always use a "/lang" suffix for all translated pages to allow autodetection of the content language, otherwise English or the user language may be assumed.
• When preparing pages for translations, don't forget to use a "Special:MyLanguage/" prefix to the target wikilink (and hide the complex link in a "tvar" to facilitate the work of translators and allow updating links for renamed pages without invalidating translations (I recommend not using the "ll" template because of that).
• Also, for translate admins, don't forget to mark pages for translations *twice* with a pseudo null-edit between markings. Otherwise transaltions (including Engish) may not reflect the changes. and make sure you try translating your new marked pages completely in at least one language,
• Then look at the layout in an RTL language (at least generate a pseudo title for Arabic by appending a /ar to the English title and look at he result). Common errors are to assume "left" and "right" alignements or margins or paddings: search for these two terms in the wiki code to see where you'll need to use {{dir}}, also don't assume the (left or right) direction of arrow characters (or icons).
• If you can, look at pages on a smartphone (connected to you local wiki hotspot to save money, or using a smartphone emulator on PC) with the mobile version of the site: frequently pages are unnecessarily requesting too wide contents or cannot adapt because they abuse tables (using floatting divs and image galeries can fix these problems). Make sure your paragraphs looks OK with lines not longer than 40em (needed for accessibilty). Many people only access the web with mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, PDA) and don't have any desktop or large notebook (even a page width of 800px is too large). Be careful aout the placement of images (all images should never be larger than 240 px and they should be floating then, but you'll need to make sure that paragraphs on the other side and display something).
• Beware of colors: they must be contrasting (avoid coloring text distinctively, it's better to colorize the background
• Don't abuse bold and italic styles for texts (they are not friendly for complex scripts like Chinese, Arabic, Thai, Khmer,... notably at small font sizes)
• Avoid fixing static sizes in pixels for text (try zooming in: many people zoom in notably on small screens like smartphones) and avoid dimensioning everything only for English. It is possible to get simple layouts that will better use the screen space without scrolling horizontally or with too long lines (larger than about 40em)
• Save vertical space. beware of very generous margins or paddings, or uncessary newlines (notably at top of pages : people don't like to have to scroll down to far away before reading the content and what the page is about).

I continue sorting pages per content language and sorting them in appropriate subcategories per language. There's lot to do do sort the existing content and get an accurate vision of the actual content and what's remainining to change, to make this site really multilingual and adapted to users around the world that use different technical means to access it (even if you think that only a few % are not reading the Englsh versions, that's only because Meta-Wiki has suffered for too long from a large US-only bias; this is changing anyway rapidly as more and more people use mobile devices including in US; even if their devices are frequently confortable with high resolutions, but people are also getting older and want more readable texts).

Thanks. verdy_p (talk) 16:07, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

Some unused pages to deletion

Next sets of unused/obsoleted pages was excluded from translation and may be deleted:

• Grants:Evaluation/Parlor/Introductions/Header/..
• Grants:Evaluation/Parlor/Introductions/Editintro ..
• Grants:Evaluation/Parlor/Introductions/..
• Template:Evaluation/People/Button..
• Programs:Evaluation portal/Parlor/Introductions/Header (unused redirect)

Any objections? --Kaganer (talk) 10:35, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

These are probably safe to delete. MCruz (WMF), EGalvez (WMF)? Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 16:16, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, J-Mo! They look ok to be deleted to me, but still looking forward to hearing from Edward and Jaime. Thanks! María (WMF) (talk) 16:23, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Yes, seems all have been migrated and may be deleted JAnstee (WMF) (talk) 17:00, 9 October 2015 (UTC)