Talk:Tech/News/2022/51

CWS?

Just wondering (after seeing an essentially untranslated CWS notice today) but does CWS fall under Tech News? — Al12si (talk) 23:44, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

I think so, but since Community Wishlist Survey 2023 starts on January 23, it should probably be in Tech News around that time, i.e. in the 2023/03 or 2023/04 issue. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 08:17, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Reverted?

Sorry for the late question but I just started looking at this and was puzzled by the example of “Reverted”. I don’t remember seeing this on my home wiki. But then I’ve turned off the Javascript interface for Recent Changes there because it’s intrusive and causes problems, so I checked the Chinese and Japanese Wikipedias (where I haven’t turned off the Javascript UI) but it’s not there either.

I suppose we can just substitute any other option that exists, but out of curiosity which wiki has the “Reverted” option? Al12si (talk) 01:16, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

All wikis should have it. Unless the wiki sets MediaWiki:Tag-mw-reverted to "-". --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:57, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Odd. I’m not seeing it on any of the wikis I checked (yue, zh, ja, fr). Does it go by another name? Al12si (talk) 11:27, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

The name can be found on the linked page on each wiki. List of all translations. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 18:39, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Open tag filters. Also, you can use them in contributions list. Wargo (talk) 14:50, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Oh... thank you! I never knew what that bookmark icon meant... I hate these icons... Al12si (talk) 19:00, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

“This will only be visible to editors who have the Beta Feature turned on”

Sorry again for late questions, but what exactly does this mean? I checked the two footnoted links but the second link seems to say when the word “Reply” is just 1 or 2 characters the arrow will automatically be added.

IOW does this mean “This will only be visible to editors who have the Beta Feature turned on” because Discussion Tools is a Beta feature? or does this mean there will be an additional setting that needs to be manually turned on before you can see the arrow? Thanks! Al12si (talk) 11:31, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

The former. Only users who are using the Discussion tools beta feature will see any kind of "reply" links inline. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:21, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

@Quiddity (WMF): No, all users see some kind of “reply” affordances on desktop unless explicitly opted out (see “Reply Tool” column of mw:Talk pages project/Deployment Status). However, this change affects only the Reply buttons, not the [reply] links, and the buttons appear only for users who have usability improvements enabled, which is still beta everywhere (see the “Usability Improvements” column).

@Al12si: Neither. It isn’t because DiscussionTools is in general still beta, but there won’t be (isn’t) a separate setting either. It depends on the already-existing usability improvements setting; if you have it enabled, whether you get the arrow only depends on your user interface language (except for the German, English and French Wikipedias, where the redesigned reply buttons are disabled irrespective of the usability improvements setting, so there are no arrows for anyone). —Tacsipacsi (talk) 16:01, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Oh! Thank you for the correction. (I have too many past/present/future details, for too many products/projects, in my head!). Sorry for my mistake. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:06, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

@Tacsipacsi Just curious, but which usability setting is it? I just went through all the Preferences that looked relevant and I did not see a generic usability setting. Is it specific to a skin? Al12si (talk) 18:50, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

@Quiddity (WMF) BTW while I was going through preferences I realized I didn’t have DiscussionTools enabled here, yet I had reply, add topic and subscribe. It looks like on some wikis all DiscussionTools do is to change the look of the reply thingie (I would have called it a button except if [ Reply ] isn’t a button I don’t know what to call the generic thing...) Al12si (talk) 18:56, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

PS: as mentioned on yuewiki, to us people who’re used to text user interfaces, [ Reply ] is clearly a button; it’s how text UI’s represent buttons on the text screen.

I worry some original intentions have not been documented and are being lost. Al12si (talk) 18:59, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

As far as I remember, it’s the “Show discussion activity” setting, as it started off with the discussion activity info below topic headers. Yeah, maybe it’s time to rephrase the setting…

DiscussionTools nowhere does only the reply look change (it does all the stuff everywhere: reply tool, new topic tool, topic subscriptions etc.), but on almost all wikis, this is the only thing that’s unavailable unless you turn on the DiscussionTools beta feature. You don’t have DiscussionTools itself enabled only if all options in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion are unchecked.

By the way, the developers call both versions affordances. It’s jargon, and I probably wouldn’t use it otherwise, but I need to if I want to refer to only the new version as “button”. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 22:45, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

I have a design background, of sorts, and one of my professors was an industrial designer, so I do sort of know what an affordance is supposed to be. I think calling this thing an affordance is kind of a misnomer; I guess the ship has sailed, which is sad. Al12si (talk) 23:59, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

I was semi-familiar with the term, but didn't recall seeing it used in our docs, so searched, and I see it is used at mw:Talk pages project/Notifications#23 April 2021 including a link to the Enwiki article which describes the history of how it has become widely used. Relatedly, naming things is hard. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:18, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

I think I’d rather they called it just a “UI element”.

Anyway, BTW, I believe juxtaposing how our devs are ignoring e.g. text interfaces (the fact that the brackets are what would be called an affordance in a CUI) with MW’s own Accessibility guide for developers shows how prevaling GUI-centric thinking is problematic. We’re moving more and more away from even “progressive enhancement”; we just focus on GUI browsers with advanced capabilities and assume that they are available, which isn’t true; all the while, we don’t even do graceful degradation because that’s not recommended. The result is barriers.

I’ve always felt if any website that’s not entertainment requires Javascript for core functionality (that doesn’t absolutely require Javascript) they’re doing it wrong, and I think I still stand by this and I think this applies to Wikimedia projects. Al12si (talk) 00:37, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

BTW, I said this on yuewiki so you probably haven’t seen it, but if they claim the new version is a “button” they’d better make sure it has role=button coded in. Last time I checked it didn’t, so from a screen reader user’s POV it’s not a button. Al12si (talk) 00:43, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

I see <a role="button">s in both the old and the new versions (I recalled the new one being a <button>, but I was wrong), and the accessibility tools of Firefox do recognize them as “pushbuttons”. The old version’s brackets are outside of the role="button", though (so they’re just part of the running text), I don’t know how much of a problem it is. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 01:18, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

You’re correct. I must have missed it last time. Al12si (talk) 03:32, 23 December 2022 (UTC)