User talk:Fetchcomms/test

Comments

I've not seen all the discussion on this, but, from what I have, the following points are those I'd raise...

1. Related news is for directly related Wikinews stories, not a generic list from one of the top-level stories; as current infoboxes are. That is, related news is where we source from our own earlier content.
2. This look great on a big monitor. Thus it excludes netbooks, mobiles, users of older machines.
3. Dates. UTC? Absolutely! It clarifies thing where sources use their timezone-specific date; thing Sydney Morning Herald.
4. Date granularity. No finer than a 15 minute point to match with push via twitter &c. A 'last updated' might be nice, but can it avoid weirdness with the archiving a few days later?
5. How simple will this be for a new contributor who is non-technical to create a publish-ready article?
6. How will this cope with the frequent really short articles that just meet minimum publishable guidelines.
7. Sub-headings. Unless you're talking a 2-3k-word article, they're redundant.
8. Bylines? Unwiki. What we have just now are hidden cats for people to keep track of their work. That should suffice, and was mostly done for OR and competition usage.

Under no circumstances do I think this should be retroactively applied; but, might be worth trying on a random selection of articles to see the end result.

I'd looked at 'purloining enWP's article cteation tool. That might be a better pririty to tackle. -- Brian McNeil (alt. account) /^{alt-talk • main talk} 18:44, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

"This look great on a big monitor. Thus it excludes netbooks, mobiles, users of older machines." I just tried this on my laptop with Firefox at the smallest width possible without horizontal scrolling, and it degraded gracefully—besides, anybody with a screen that small (about 300px wide, I think) has to expect the Internet to break, and I was surprised that all the functionality of this layout still worked. I also tried it on my BlackBerry, and it was no worse than the current Wikinews article layout, and better than most web news sources (with the exception of the BBC, with their dedicated mobile version, something we really need). Δενδοδγε _τ\^c 11:51, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

Fixed width boxes (I don't know if fetchcomm's current proposal has any) are quite fragile with narrow windows. I use narrow windows a lot on my wide laptop, and plain vanilla mediawiki vector skin actually works great. No, I don't expect the web to break on simple devices: I expect my favourite websites to put in some effort to degrade gracefully. Also I have friends with partial sight - even a high resolution screen is only a few dozen characters wide for them. --InfantGorilla (talk) 12:39, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

There are very few devices on which this will break. Having tried in a variety of screen sizes and resolutions on a variety of devices, I found none on which it broke—it looks better on a large screen than a small one, but only because of text wrapping, which clearly isn't a very big issue. I get horizontal scrolling on my BlackBerry in normal view when I zoom in to a readable size, as I do an pretty much every website in existence, but I usually use column view for extended reading anyway, and it looks great in that (much, much, better than the Vector skin). I really can't find any way to make this cause problems. Δενδοδγε _τ\^c 17:08, 6 August 2010 (UTC)