Design System Team/Workstreams

Current Workstreams

Codex, the design system for Wikimedia and user-interface library

The Codex design system for Wikimedia is the place where all of the components and patterns that designers use to create products are systematically organized, in such a way that parts are easy to find, and modify, and new parts easy to create. The design system is grounded in a set of principles and guidelines, the Codex Design Style Guide for Wikimedia, maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation Design Team with consistency, efficiency, web accessibility, and internationalization in mind.

Part of Codex is the frontend development toolkit for implementing the design system in code. It provides engineers with user-interactive components that are built-in CSS components. and JavaScript Vue 3 components, with design tokens to store data for design values, and user-facing documentation.

Front-end technology

Wikimedia's 2019 medium-term platform evolution plan set out to prioritize modern engineering practices, performance, and ease-of-use for contributors of varying experience levels. As a result, the Design System Team organized the Vue.js Developer Summit 2021 which led to the decision to adopt Vue.js as the official programming framework for MediaWiki.