Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Usability/Reducing interface complexity

Person icon

Re: "Removing the icon to the left of the six tabs at the upper right." I believe is referring to Image:User.gif which I remove by adding this to my css:

/* hide the person-icon by your username-link (at page top) */
li#pt-userpage {background:none}

I agree with the suggestion of removing it altogether, as it doesn't seem to do anything useful. -- Quiddity (talk) 06:35, 9 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

References and citations

The Google Scholar beta with "wikify" option looks great for articles in academic and professional journals. but it only works for "scholarly" sources and topics, so would exclude many non-academic topics (e.g. games, widely-used computer software, events that are important but too recent for academic historians - and a few thousand other categories) and probably many non-academic but reliable sources such New Scientist (which I've used in at least 1 paleontology article) and The Economist. I think Wikipedia needs a references and citations extension to the Edit pages, as discussed at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 8 - someone's already developed a tool that's written in PHP (see the Village pump page cited, and the one to which that discussion links), so it should be easy to bolt on (with a few mods, e.g. a "clipboard" area into which one can copy the full citation details before pasting the right elements into citation form fields - that would save a lot of tabbing between the cited article and the article being edited). I'd prefer to see it open in a new window / tab - I know the "strict" HTML and XHTML DTDs omit the "target" attribute of links, but I notice Wikipedia uses the "transitional" XHTML DTD, which includes "target". Philcha (talk) 22:50, 14 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

References gadget

The project may be interested in User:Mr.Z-man/refToolbar, currently a JavaScript gadget that can be turned on in the preferences Gadgets section. Mr.Z-man 04:50, 27 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please, Bring back the old panel!

Please, bring back the old panel! It was much more easer than a new one for ukrainian users. In this page - [1] you could see that Ukrainian wikipedians are disappointed with new panel - it does not have at least 12 important functions. Please DO NOT destroy wikipedia, please STOP doing WP more and more uncomfortable. --A1 (talk) 17:40, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I couldn't agree with you more if I was PAID to agree, A1! - You guys aren't making Wikipedia more usable, all you are doing is creating one unholy bloody mess and you need to stop while you can. The new edit bar (which looks like it was based on LQT) isn't usable, it simply hides most of the functions of the main one. The planning for introducing LQT here will KILL talk pages, since they don't actually store any text, and LQT is a sod to use. A normal comments page is fine, it works, and people don't need to go looking for things and learning how to show and hide tools before they can use it. The usability teams stuff is (i thought anyhow) only for people on the Vector interface, and yet it's showing up everywhere. For God's sake, stop ruining a perfectly good site by fucking with stuff people already understand. Barking Fish 01:19, 22 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]