Talk:Wikivoyage 2013/CentralNotice

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Punctuation[edit]

The full stop in the middle is a little dull and I see no links. Okay, maybe links and punctuation can be handled independently from translation. But I don't know where else to say this so here goes:

I would punctuate and link it like this
This week we are launching Wikivoyage—join us in creating a free travel guide that anyone can edit
Just as a note, it drives me nuts when there's no period at the end of a sentence.  :) Philippe (WMF) (talk) 08:28, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I left off the period on purpose. This notice is signage, not prose. --Rogerhc (talk) 21:13, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Phrasing[edit]

I think the phrase is a little too formal. Let's shorten the phrasing

from:

"This week we are launching Wikivoyage—join us in creating a free travel guide that anyone can edit"

to:

"This week we are launching Wikivoyage—join us creating a free travel guide anyone can edit"

At least in English. --Rogerhc (talk) 21:25, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Also, for designs layouts that use two lines a dash looks out of place. IF we use a two line layout, we should skip the dash and capitalize the first letter of both lines, like this:

This week we are launching Wikivoyage
Join us creating a free travel guide anyone can edit

So I will do it this way if we use two line layout. --Rogerhc (talk) 21:44, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Is it too late to change the phrasing (I know its live, but can it still be changed)? That wording just seems a little odd and makes it seem like Wikipedia (or other projects, depending on which is being read) is launching a project. I suggest the following:
  • "The Wikimedia Foundation is excited to announce the launch of Wikivoyage! Join us in creating the free travel guide that anyone can edit." or
  • "The Wikimedia Foundation is excited to launch its latest project—Wikivoyage. Join us in creating the free travel guide that anyone can edit."
Both of these more clearly convey who is launching the project and just sound better to me (for what that's worth). I might forget to check back here, so if anyone needs my attention to a comment here, drop a line here. AHeneen (talk) 05:28, 15 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It is really the Wikimedia movement that is launching this new site. Hard to explain this properly though. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:31, 15 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Responding here since it has more of the conversation but going to put a pointer on enWikivoyage where the question was raised as well. The short answer is that 'no' we can always change the banner text though the the long answer is more like 'kind of'. The text being used now was put into translation when people settled on it and so it's in a bunch of other languages as well which are difficult to 're translate'. In general you can obviously have different text in each language but it's best to usually try to keep it as similar as possible. That said if there is a general consensus (even relatively quickly) and Meta admin can make the changes and I'm happy to help as well. Jalexander (talk) 06:22, 15 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with James. I too tangled with this question of specifying who "we" are, and finally decided simply "we" was more accurate than naming any foundation or movement. We are we. It would take an essay to specify further who we are and the banner just isn't an essay. --Rogerhc (talk) 21:35, 15 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Link[edit]

Link to the relevant language version of Wikivoyage:

//de.wikivoyage.org
//en.wikivoyage.org
//es.wikivoyage.org
//fr.wikivoyage.org
//it.wikivoyage.org
//nl.wikivoyage.org
//pt.wikivoyage.org
//ru.wikivoyage.org
//sv.wikivoyage.org
All others will get //en.wikivoyage.org. It will all be coded in HTML because CentalNotice does not accupt wikimarkup. --Rogerhc (talk) 19:11, 11 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Changed my mind--and struck my idea, above--because after half a days thought I realize it will be better to have everyone go through the portal at http://wikivoyage.org their first time in so that they are aware of all our language versions, especially their first time.
The Central Notice should link to the http://Wikivoyage.org portal rather than directly to any one language version, so that people are aware of all our language versions their first time through. The external link icon a full URL generates is also actually helpful here, too, because Wikipedia is where Central Notice gets most views and having an external link icon will help communicate the message that Wikivoyage is not a travel section of Wikipedia but rather a different website altogether with different goals, style, and guidelines. This message will be missed by many and needs to be communicated in as many ways as practicable; we don't want to alienate people with it but we need to communicate it. An external form URL link implies that more effectively. --Rogerhc (talk) 00:50, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

People who click central notice banner, if at all, are usually only curious. Therefore we must show them directly to the relevant language version Wikivoyage Main Page. If we send them to the Wikivoyage portal, most will go no farther. Remember, they were doing something on a (probably) Wikipedia page and mostly want to get back to that after a quick peak at whatever our message is. So we must show them directly, in one click, to our Wikivoyage Main Page because most of them wont go two clicks deep and will not even see our Main Page at all if we send the to portal. Must be only one click on central notice banner to get to Main Page. --Rogerhc (talk) 19:05, 11 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Layout[edit]

If we put the Wikivoyage logo in there somewhere, we should of course change this layout from one liner style to banner style. Hope this helps, --Rogerhc (talk) 20:07, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes agree. Feel free to make these changes Roger. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:09, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, I edited the English sample punctuation and link. --Rogerhc (talk) 00:52, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Problem?[edit]

James, I don't know how to ask for translations on Meta but I have doubts about Translations, which is towards the top of the page Wikivoyage 2013/CentralNotice wiki text, getting any attention. Seems to me Wikimania 2012 is the wrong cat for this. Also, what is that red link in the div at the page top? Not sure what cat would be right. However, if we want to request translation, we had better use something that will get translators' attention. Have you had a look at Meta:Babylon for current translation processes? --Rogerhc (talk) 03:31, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have no idea how these work. Hopefully someone will help us with it. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:31, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I've fixed the templates and forwarded to translators-l. --Nemo 21:22, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:00, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Wow! Love all those beautiful translations! Thanks all! --Rogerhc (talk) 05:27, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Help[edit]

WAIT, everyone read this first? --> Help:CentralNotice
So:
"only desktop browsers can, at this time, recieve banners." Good to know.
Special:CentralNotice is used to create and manage central notices, they must be in HTML only.
Only Meta:Administrators can use Special:CentralNotice. Jalexander has offered to do it.
"Banner code is largely HTML. Most wikitext will not work (with a few exceptions found below). The HTML is not run through HTMLTidy or any other program to check for its accuracy, so it's crucial that it be well-formed, otherwise pages can and will break horribly."(Fundraising_2010/Banner_guide#Code)
--Rogerhc (talk) 20:30, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

[edit]

How do we go about adding the new logo to the banner? And should we link to the WMF press release? Or I guess we could link to the press release from the English main page? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]


[edit]

Which do you like?[edit]

Please voice opinions on the mock ups here:

Concepts[edit]

Everything below was created in wikimarkup. However, CentralNotice must be in HTML.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

To add logo and other graphics, lets make this a banner! Maybe combine some stunning travel photos from our destination of the month collection (we'd want to provide photo credits, maybe in fine print under each photo), our new logo, and the launch announcement message. Let's do banner mock ups below. --Rogerhc (talk) 17:47, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

To do it in HTML I think a div with a background image for the travel photos that slides away under the page's z level out the right, or maybe cooler out the left side, of the div so that more images appear when the window is larger would work. I don't know how to do HTML on this wiki page though. IMG and A tags don't seem to be allowed in the wiki markup. --Rogerhc (talk) 01:51, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The Photo credits link would ideally be a pop open list of photo credits for all the travel photos in the banner, probably done with javascript. Can someone code that for us? An alert box would be too tacky of course. --Rogerhc (talk) 06:34, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi guys, I'm not sure if you've had at a look at Fundraising 2010/Banner guide yet, but that provides some useful information on CentralNotice banners. There's also some information at Help:CentralNotice#Designing banners with regards to Designing banners. I'm not sure if there's any particular style of banners that work best or that are recommended though as I've not done any banner design myself - I could ask around? Thehelpfulone 13:58, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, please ask around for someone with experience with CentralNotice to help us. Only admins can use the CentralNotice banner creation tool and I am not an admin so cannot even do mock ups with it. Also, it requires HTML, wont accept wikimarkup, I think. CentralNotice gets very hight exposure and should be done well or not at all. I think we need experienced help with this to do it. The examples on this talk page are just ideas. We are short on time (we are scheduled to run this CentralNotice January 15 - 17) and these ideas need to be tested in the CentralNotice banner creation tool. I am not an admin nor a professional designer and have taken this as far as I can. Help definitely needed. Thanks! --Rogerhc (talk) 18:14, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
If no one else is available I can help some especially for simpler ones that are easy to throw together. I would recommend something similar to the simple versions (especially the 1 liner) with only one logo on the left. The heavy graphics or 2 logo ones are sometimes possible but get very complicated to make sure that they work on a majority of browsers/screen sizes. The biggest problem is that we have a wide variety of browsers and screen sizes and so we want to make the banner as flexible as possible, anything that forces it into a specific amount of pixels (and doesn't have good room for wrapping etc) ends up making it look really ugly as the screens/browsers get further away from the original one used for the design. Jalexander (talk) 18:41, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Here's an example of a CentralNotice that scales elegantly, it has a background image in a div that displays well at all screen sizes from narrow to wide. We could do something like that, perhaps using it as the starting point. The travel photos add interest and color but are not individually important, so a background image could be made out of them that could slide out of the div to the right to accommodate wide or narrow screens. We would need someone who knows how to make it happen in HTML in the CentralNotice banner creation tool however. --Rogerhc (talk) 19:07, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yup, I made that one along with all of the other banners that year :). It scales relatively ok because I had it fade into a plain html color (so the left of the banner is just plain black) it's actually a relatively 'basic' banner in that sense (one plain image with plain color background/small amount of text). We can certainly do something like that though actually filling the banner with images is much harder, and to be honest more ugly. It makes readable text harder and makes the user load more images (which can be a big problem, on banners you always need to make sure all images are as small as possible and try to keep it to a minimum) We certainly could make images just fall off the side for most browsers (they would actually still be there we would just be hiding the overflow) though it isn't the simplest thing in the world which is why we don't use it much. I also think that banner is already far too big and I think it would be a lot better to try and make it into a smaller and simpler banner which will still be seen by most people but not jump out at their senses (in a bad way) as much. CN banners have a huge reach and a huge 'wow' factor but they have that even if they are't that big and it's good to try and balance getting the word out with annoyance factor. I'm certainly not against images but I don't think we want anything that jumpy.
We also want to avoid having any 'extra' links (like the photo credits link despite obviously needing photo credits if it has images that need it) we want the whole banner to go to one page because any other link will send people away from where we want them to go and has proven to dramatically decrease effectiveness. In fundraising (which is obviously a different thing but is a nice place to be able to test things) we even found that extra links froze people up and stopped more from clicking anywhere at all, user testing seemed to say they got a bit confused and ended up just moving on. Jalexander (talk) 19:44, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Great information. with your experience you would be a great person to help us with this. Too bad wiki markup doesn't work in the banner tool. Any chance that I, a non-admin, could try mock ups of my banner ideas in an instance of the banner creation tool maybe on a test wiki? --Rogerhc (talk) 00:54, 11 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I have no problem with that, test wiki, is perfect for it. you can target a campaign to test wiki as well to see it live (or use a banner force by going to a page on the wiki with ?banner=bannername to show it ... just remember to clear the cookie if you try to hide it :) ). It looks like you aren't registered there yet but when you do let me, TheHelpfulOne (above) or any of the crats there (THO is one of them) who can give you +sysop there so that you have access. Jalexander (talk) 03:03, 11 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Design concepts; work in progress:


Travel photos to work with[edit]

See the featured pictures of (Natural PlacesArchitecturePlaces).

Div banner A1[edit]

Travel photos, maybe two rows filling black area, from destination of the month collection. --Rogerhc (talk) 19:24, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We are launching
Wikivoyage—join us
creating a free travel guide anyone can edit

Photo credits

Uh, don't you think that's a bit large? That'll take up some serious screen space. Maybe something like 50px height would be a bit more reasonable? --Yair rand (talk) 19:41, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think it is right size. It is a dismissable site notice I believe. So need not be in anyones way. I've modeled it on this banner size. Do we have guidelines for this anywhere? --Rogerhc (talk) 01:46, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Table banner B1[edit]

Div markup, above, seems to be working better than this table markup. Maybe don't use table markup. --Rogerhc (talk) 18:51, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

B1.2[edit]

try some travel photos


This week we are launching Wikivoyage—join us in creating a free travel guide that anyone can edit


I tried to adjust the width of this banner. I changed both the top and left margin of the text box to align it with the margin of the images box. I replaced even an image with one more evocative of the holiday at the sea. I try the box with the longest text (Russian) and it gives no problems. I add also box shadow property to the text box, but if it gives problem you can remove it.  Raoli  03:07, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
For the images see the featured pictures of (Natural PlacesArchitecturePlaces). -- Raoli  03:30, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
B1.3 smaller[edit]

Black table background is proving difficult, try something else (anyway, I think we have to use HTML for CentralNotice and not wikimarkup so maybe we better switch to HTML... for next attempt):

This week we are launching
Wikivoyage—join us
creating the free travel guide anyone can edit

B HTML[edit]

I think CentralNotice cannot use wikimarkup, so here's HTML. Oh, wait, I don't think I can mock this up here in HTML because IMG and A tags are not allowed here. :/ --Rogerhc (talk) 01:17, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This week we are launching <a href="//www.wikivoyage.org" class="plainlinks" style="font-weight:bold;">Wikivoyage</a>—join us in creating a free travel guide that anyone can edit

<img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Magic_Kingdom_-_The_%27Big_Bang%27_at_Wishes_-_by_hyku.jpg" height="100px" />

Image[edit]

I'm having trouble getting wiki markup to do what I want. I may try making a banner as an image in Gimp next. I guess 800x200 (px) or 1000x200 maybe? With lots of travel pics from our destination of the month collection, too... --Rogerhc (talk) 19:23, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You can try using this color #D9CAAD (sand) with box-shadow for images. I would replace the link to Wikivoyage with a JQuery button. I would add also a few of border-radius.  Raoli  21:20, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Advice at Help:CentralNotice is keep it as simple as possible. I think we can achieve good clean design that works well without radius or shadow. However, feel free to make some banner mock ups. --Rogerhc (talk) 01:07, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

An 800x160 image would be this big:

A 1000x160 image would be this big:

Simple banner[edit]

This week we are launching Wikivoyage—join us in creating a free travel guide that anyone can edit

How about this? --Yair rand (talk) 20:06, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That looks nice. Let's go ahead and use something like that if the big banner doesn't work out. I like the link in class="plainlinks" style (no external link icon); I added links in the logo images (link=//www.wikivoyage.org), too. --Rogerhc (talk) 20:11, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Various size marbles to play with:

--Rogerhc (talk) 04:11, 11 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Various size marbles to play with:

--Rogerhc (talk) 04:11, 11 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Simple banner font-size:130%[edit]

This week we are launching Wikivoyage—join us in creating a free travel guide that anyone can edit

Simple banner one marble[edit]

This week we are launching Wikivoyage—join us in creating a free travel guide that anyone can edit

Simple banner 2[edit]

60px logos:

This week we are launching Wikivoyage—join us in
creating a free travel guide that anyone can edit

50px logos:

This week we are launching Wikivoyage—join us in
creating a free travel guide that anyone can edit

44px logos, removed "in" from "Join us in":

This week we are launching Wikivoyage—join us
creating a free travel guide that anyone can edit

The font-size is too large, or logos, or both? --Rogerhc (talk) 22:20, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Mostly the font-size, though the logos could stand to be smaller as well. --Yair rand (talk) 22:47, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Simple banner 2.1[edit]

60px logos font-size:130%:

This week we are launching Wikivoyage—join us in
creating a free travel guide that anyone can edit

50px logos font-size:130%:

This week we are launching Wikivoyage—join us in
creating a free travel guide that anyone can edit

44px logos, font-size:130%:

This week we are launching Wikivoyage—join us
creating a free travel guide that anyone can edit

Please add more examples![edit]

please add your banner mock ups, too--everyone please help--we Wikivoyagers need your graphic talent!

The admin stuff[edit]

To launch the campaign is here. We are looking at all languages. [1] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:33, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]