Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2013/December

Wikidata and Wikinews

Hi,

I invite you to participate in the development of the draft about how Wikidata could support Wikinews.

Thank you!
--sasha (krassotkin) 19:01, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

New Search coming as BetaFeature

I plan to deploy our replacement search system CirrusSearch to all wikinewses December 18th as a secondary search system. You won't see any change until I make it available as a BetaFeature, which I plan to do December 20th. The lag is due to the time required to build the search index. If there are issues building the search index it might have to wait until early January given WMF's moratorium against non-critical deployments over the holiday. The short list of Cirrus features that are new will probably effect you:

1. Faster search updates. Not instant but normally within a few seconds.
2. Templates expanded in search text. This includes categories included in templates, transcluded pages, etc.
3. Negated category filters, e.g. "-incategory:musicals". You can do the same with the intitle filter, but I recall negating incategory was mentioned when I posted about Cirrus a month ago.
4. Smooth recent article boot. The boost your articles get for recent edits will switch from a stepwise function to one based on an exponential curve that fit the old stepwise function. This should be pretty seamless. The change was made so that it would be easier to test over short time scales.
5. You'll be able to shut off that recent edits boost by prefixing you search with "prefer-recent:0". You can actually customize it more if you reall want. See the documentation for how.

NEverett (WMF) (talk) 15:52, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Font used in the Wikinews logo?

My closest attempt so far

Hi, long story short: we want to create SVG versions of the Wikinews logos in all languages (English included). The point where we are stuck is the font used in the current logo. Does anybody know? As far as I know David Vasquez (t · c · b) is no longer around. I also wonder if other people that adapted the logo to other languages would know. Thank you for your help.--Qgil (talk) 19:56, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

• Unfortunately, I don't think anyone can - with certainty - say which font was originally used. What you've used is probably close-enough, and looks to be the same as I picked out when drafting templates for Wikinews business cards. David Vasquez did a lot of his work with non-free software, and I'd guess that's also the case when the logo was created. What'd need done with your attempt is to drop the text size a couple of points and increase the kerning/spacing on the characters.

What I would suggest in reworking the logos is to use a degree of transparency (of a graphical nature, that is). From time to time we make use of video, and favour branding clips with the logo. Where it's solid/non-transparent, it tends to look pretty bad on video.

There's actually a whole 'graphical family' needed around the logo. You'll find several people have done country-specific variants (reduced to a map of that country, instead of the unusual world map projection). Plus, where we've top-level topic categories (eg Crime and law) these can be well-illustrated with a variant using an appropriate graphic (such as the scales of justice). --Brian McNeil / ^talk 11:20, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the feedback, Brian McNeil (t · c · b). The font I have used is Liberation Sans. Following your advice, the last version has smaller font and wider kerning. Question: do you want to keep the blur around the text? The goal of the bug report linked above is to produce SVGs for the site logos. If we agree on a SVG that can substitute commons:File:Wikinews-logo-en.png, then producing versions with transparency or variations in the map will be pretty simple.--Qgil (talk) 23:47, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Because the wordmark is relatively plain, omitting the drop shadow makes the wordmark look rather unpolished, in my opinion. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 00:50, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

• I'd concur with that, a subtle drop shadow improves the look significantly. I would darken the text somewhat from the sample/example in this section too. What may be problematic (I'm speculating here, would love proven wrong) is how the effect looks in non-latin scripts for the project name.

Now, I made mention of using the logo to brand video content, and the need for the logo to have an 'appropriate' level of transparency to not completely screw up how video looks. I didn't end up using the last video clips I edited together, which was down to having so bad a cold I couldn't do the correspondent voiceover without sounding truly awful. What I did do (with GiMP) was add a radial transparency overlay. You can have a look at how that appears here, and I intend to put together a little how-to video on branding video content.

Since we're looking at the "corporate branding" (spits) of Wikinews, there is a broader subject that may be worth raising. Namely, we need to look sufficiently different from Wikipedia that the "I thought I was still on Wikipedia" comments are completely untenable; I think anyone who has been involved with Wikinews for any length of time has seen that, like me suspects it's faux/willful ignorance, and is a form of 'trolling' by a few Wikipedians. Yes, we need to stick with the Vector skin so we're not making excess work for the folks who maintain the interface, but people need to know they're "not in Kansas anymore". Jon's work to put together the CSS et-al for the main page is good enough that we don't want to muck about with that too much, so where a differentiation comes in is something I struggle with. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 12:13, 23 December 2013 (UTC)