Mastodawn

hot take: if you willingly step on every rake until you get a concussion from it, probably best not to blame rakes in this situation, or prevent everyone else from using them just because you did that. if you know you know

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stjn Jun 10, 2025

Why is it bad design? Because as soon as
— the table gets narrower,
— or the block reasons (3rd column) get longer,
— or there are more block parameters (2nd),
the entire page becomes horribly structured. There is no reason for table here, as no one would have even just 5 active blocks.

The solution? Create a new component to display this info in a readable, adaptive design instead of using a badly fitting one.

UI standardisation is pointless if it doesn’t produce a good interface.

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stjn Jun 10, 2025

Screenshot of the real thing below for transparency. Even with fake data (the actual block reasons, third column, are usually longer), this is bad design.

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stjn Jun 10, 2025

Don’t get me wrong, I think having a design system is long overdue and a completely good development for MediaWiki. However, the lead for the project took this screenshot and didn’t even ask the obvious question ‘Should this really use a table when it looks so shit?’

And this is where WMF and MediaWiki are going horribly wrong with Codex at the moment.

stjn Jun 10, 2025

Codex redesign of Special:Block might be well-intentioned, but it highlights one thing: WMF designers have completely replaced the genuine design thinking process with just slapping a somewhat related component and not putting much more thought into it.

File is from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2023/Multiblocks

stjn May 13, 2025

I wish MediaWiki (or maybe DiscussionTools) had some feature that made it so talk subpages of non-existing pages try to link to their root page if possible (maybe adding a third tab to the subpage so you can still create it). Such a simple quality of life improvement.

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stjn Apr 26, 2025

(prompted by my own note from a year ago for DiscordWikiBot saying ‘Ignore {{transclusions}} starting with /’, which made me investigate whether this is a thing or not)

stjn Apr 26, 2025

Template name that breaks depending on whether a namespace allows subpages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:/æ/_raising_in_North_American_English

Wikitext is {{awesome}}}}

Template:/æ/ raising in North American English - Wikipedia

stjn Mar 18, 2025

Small patch alert for funny and handsome people with +2 permissions for MediaWiki core:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T386403

It changes a tooltip for Help link in the sidebar from ‘The place to find out’ to ‘Guides on how to use and edit this website’.

(…the place to [fuck around and] find out)

⚓ T386403 Update [[MediaWiki:Tooltip-n-help]] to use better text

stjn Mar 17, 2025

Vector 2022 deployment shows again and again that WMF only cares about its English-speaking user base and no one else. Alienating the most tech-proficient editors for zero reason despite us engaging constructively for 3 years now. A great example of how not to do PR work and community relations.

(prompted by the coming deployment to Russian Wikipedia)
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия:Форум/Технический#Вектор_2022:_И_снова_привет!_Изменение_внешнего_вида_по_умолчанию

Pronouns	he/him, they/them · он/его, они/их
English user page	https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Stjn
Russian	https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Участник:Stjn
Other links	https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/p/stjn/

Template:/æ/ raising in North American English - Wikipedia

⚓ T386403 Update [[MediaWiki:Tooltip-n-help]] to use better text

Википедия:Форум/Технический: различия между версиями — Википедия