Block notice/CSS change
Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2023 11:18 pm
I was reading some boring discussion on Wikipedoa, when I noticed that the block notice looked weird - it had a weird icon and tons of unnecessary whitespace. So I looked into it, and sure enough, it was more "design improvement" garbage from the WMF.
This began all the way back in 2021 when the WMF introduced the Codex framework into MediaWiki. No one really cared until late last year, when the WMF started an initiative to add CSS based icons to certain notices, but still almost no one other than developers knew about it. But then as part of the "iconization" process, a request for a block notice icon was submitted to Phabricator in January. As usual with WMF development, almost nothing happened for months. Eventually however, a patch was submitted on June 16.
When it was rolled out on June 29th, a discussion about it was posted to VP/T by Oshwah. As usual with Wikipedians, they HATE it and have already created CSS modifications to remove it. Ironically WMF developer TheresNoTime disabled it too. Funny how they force their rollouts on users, but can't be bothered to use it themselves.
As the WMF continues to roll these icon changes out, I expect to see squabbles like this. Probably not on a "Vector 22 level" (which was ironically neither created nor rolled out in 2022), but I do expect to see some smaller discussions and possibly a request to a CSS-based override on the discussion page for common.css or the i-admin or VP/T noticeboards.
This began all the way back in 2021 when the WMF introduced the Codex framework into MediaWiki. No one really cared until late last year, when the WMF started an initiative to add CSS based icons to certain notices, but still almost no one other than developers knew about it. But then as part of the "iconization" process, a request for a block notice icon was submitted to Phabricator in January. As usual with WMF development, almost nothing happened for months. Eventually however, a patch was submitted on June 16.
When it was rolled out on June 29th, a discussion about it was posted to VP/T by Oshwah. As usual with Wikipedians, they HATE it and have already created CSS modifications to remove it. Ironically WMF developer TheresNoTime disabled it too. Funny how they force their rollouts on users, but can't be bothered to use it themselves.
As the WMF continues to roll these icon changes out, I expect to see squabbles like this. Probably not on a "Vector 22 level" (which was ironically neither created nor rolled out in 2022), but I do expect to see some smaller discussions and possibly a request to a CSS-based override on the discussion page for common.css or the i-admin or VP/T noticeboards.