User talk:Jaredzimmerman (WMF)

Drafts

I like the image you made, so I updated {{Draft }} with it. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 04:55, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 05:03, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

@Steven, nice, we should code it up for real.

User and user talk page

Hi. I redirected User:JZimmerman (WMF) and User talk:JZimmerman (WMF) to User:Jaredzimmerman (WMF) and User talk:Jaredzimmerman (WMF) as it looks like you manually renamed yourself in October. Hope you don't mind. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:09, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 06:35, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
Thanks MZMcBride! I appreciate it.

Introspection exhibition

I think one day we should find someone to make a gallery of how different people around the world see Wikimedia wikis. "How I see Wikipedia" or "How Wikisource looks to me" or something like that. I uploaded a screenshot at <http://i.imgur.com/nsqQEQf.png> for myself. I don't miss the globe or most of the sidebar sections. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:15, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 06:43, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
MZMcBride, do you mean after people do a lot of end user customization? We did a similar thing at Autodesk but since it was based on config files we were able to parse them with code. While screenshots would certainly be interesting to look through, the shear number of images might be too large a task to parse through in a meaningful way (not a reason to avoid doing it) just something to think about when devoting effort to a project like that. We are definitely planning on adding visual diffing to our regression test at some point. So we'll have a server side equivalent but it will be based on the test system and not any "aftermarket" customization users have done or exotic browsers they may be using. Thank you for the interesting idea.

People who do a lot of end-user customization ("power users") would be one group, sure. But most views (something like 90%+... I should have a more accurate stat) of our site are anonymous views. So even doing a logged-out screenshot of the English Wikipedia main page (using the default Vector skin) in many browsers would be interesting as a gallery, I think. All different variations could be explored. --MZMcBride (talk) 07:02, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 08:28, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
Sounds like that would be the same as (but not as good as) regular automated browser testing, where we can control things like window size. Otherwise diff detection become needle in a haystack as to what is actually changing per system. It would certainly show us things like font issues but we're likely not going to download fonts to users systems unless it's something like opendyslexic or a language font issue the user has explicitly requested. What did you have in mind as far as a question this would help us solve?

I actually didn't see any practical value in it at all. I just thought it would be interesting to see such a gallery (or galleries). It could prove to be useful for limited testing, but it would not be an attempt to try to show very combination of changes (Monobook v. Vector, OpenDyslexic v. sans-serif, administrator v. regular user). I hadn't thought about OpenDyslexic, but that's exactly the kind of tweak/modification that I think would be interesting to see in a gallery of how people (readers, editors, power users, etc.) view Wikimedia wikis. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 08:55, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

MZ, to start with you could use http://www.webpagetest.org/ for some kinds of pages, setting "dial up" speed, and see what comes out of it. If you click "video" it also gives you a gallery of screenshots. --Nemo 08:59, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 16:55, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
Like I said it could be very interesting, not the best way to gather large scale data but interesting none the less. When we do research like that we always start with a hypothesis to test or at least a question we're trying to answer that would be action all once we'd learned what we needed to from the test. Also taking and sending screenshots is pretty far beyond many readers skill level. So you'd already be self selecting a group of users that might not be reflective of "everyone" there are JavaScript libraries that you can use to allow the user to capture the screen from within the browser, many sites use this as part of help & support flows in order to better see what the user is seeing when they have technical issues. Turning something like that into an extension could be a way of increasing the number of people who could participate. In general though I wonder how many readers you would actually get to send you screenshots of their screen without a clear rational behind why. And even with a reason I don't know how many would spend the time it takes to participate. Figuring a way to lower the technical barrier down to a button click would be a good first step though.

Signing posts

Why are you putting your signature before your posts? This makes discussions needlessly confusing when everyone else signs after their posts. Anomie (talk) 14:34, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Yeah I hate to be a grumpy Wikipedian but don't do that. You can have usernames before posts when Flow arrives. ;) Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 19:58, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Steven Walling (WMF), I'm confused by the • in your signature, it seems inconsistent with other people's signatures, I don't see it in other people's signatures, and it is needlessly confusing. ;)

Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 20:03, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, but I didn't Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:55, 9 January 2014 (UTC) sign my posts Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:55, 9 January 2014 (UTC) in a completely weird way Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:55, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Design team visibility

Hello Jared, I improved a bit user pages of your team members, to add a visible link to the Design team, and a Category:Design team at the bottom. May & Vibha have userpages on wikimediafoundation.org, which means I (WP editors, WP admins) haven't editor rights there.

For main feedbacks, there is de facto distances between common WP editors, working on wikipedia, and your team & work, in SF offices, trello, github, etc. Also, when we land on your user pages, it's important we quickly notice the team your are part of, its main page, the members list and relevant sub-project pages. So when we meet one of you we can engage quickly.

Thanks for your positive and listening leadership, we love it. Yug (talk) 12:35, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

• Thanks Yug, we're all fixed now, I migrated both of them to have mediawiki.org pages so the catagory works now. Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 12:57, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Compact Personal Bar

I wanted to reply to your message but I get an error "The error message received was: This topic is closed for any further activities." - yet another annoyance with Flow. Here's my response: "I am not sure if that function is a gadget, it's a manual code I added to my vector skin years back - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus/vector.js . If you whether this has been replaced by a gadget, let me know! Cheers," If you reply, please ping me at en wikipedia as I don't come to mediawiki.org more often than once per month... --Piotrus (talk) 10:08, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

Piotrus, there is literally no way we can maintain code that is compatible with every possible configuration users could make to the skin.js, so I'm not sure if there is anything to be done there.

for your issue with Flow, its very easy to reopen and continue a conversation in Flow, simply choose reopen from the action menu […]

screenshot of flow "reopen discussion" functionality to illustrate access point

, the concept of a closed conversation is not new to flow. Now, its just easier to close and reopen them.