Talk:Design/How to give design feedback

It took quite a bit of effort to find this page, but I still don't know where to send design feedback. Can someone add a link to where design feedback is supposed to be provided?

Hi. It depends which aspect(s) you want to give feedback about! Ideally your feedback would be close-in-proximity to the specific extension/skin/feature/etc that it is about. This seems to be more of a general guidance page.

Thanks, I have a question about/suggestion for the article layout of Wikipedia. I can't find the place to send that via search engines (as these show Wikipedia articles about design and feedback instead). Through browsing Wikipedia and MediaWiki, I found this page. If feedback is desired, I'd like to add a link to this page to the page where people can provide feedback.

Hi, it's still somewhat unclear what you're proposing because you've described it so abstractly! :)

Possibly you mean the "layout" in the sense of w:en:WP:LAYOUT (the manual of style page for the English Wikipedia which covers how they structure the contents within an article), in which case you'd want to discuss it on the talkpage there.

Or, possibly you're thinking of the "layout" in the sense of the "skin" that adds visual styling to the bare contents of all https://www.wikimedia.org wikis, e.g. Skin:Vector vs Skin:MonoBook and similar (which we can all change for ourselves from our Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering on each wiki).

Hope that helps. If not, please provide more details. :)

Thanks! Yes, I found out about the custom CSS after logging to ask these questions. It allowed me to make my own changes. My feedback is for the Vector skin; I think it could be very much improved by setting a max-width of the articles' main text. I still haven't figured out where to send that feedback...

Ah, that would be a major change. There was an attempt to make this change during early iterations of the Typography Refresh. You can read the feedback that was given at the time (disclaimer: some by me with my volunteer-hat) at Talk:Typography refresh/Archive_2#Limitation of page content width needs some more thought and at Talk:Typography refresh/Archive 2#max-width: 715px and elsewhere in that "Archive 2" page TLDR: It's complicated, especially because of (1) personal preferences, (2) tabular data, (3) panorama images. I'm personally hoping we can make it an optional accessibility feature, via something like phab:T91201, whilst accounting for content that ought to expand outside of the fixed-width (i.e. #2 and #3 above). In the meantime, it sounds like you've partially solved it for yourself via personal CSS. :-)

Great, I figured people must have tried it before. It's a pity the whole content width was limited. Only limiting headings and paragraph text would have allowed for more use of screen space. The argument of 'my screen is very big and half it is useless this way' is invalid, as the amount of screen covered with text is not a good measure of readability. But I guess this is neither the place nor time to bring back that discussion.

I'm still puzzled by how the design process takes place and what the role of user feedback plays in it though!