Forum:Floating article icons

Forum: The Situation Room > Floating article icons

I've been meaning to bring this up for ages. One thing I think Wiki 24 needs is a distinction between IU and OOU articles. Memory Alpha uses a "real world perspective" icon which appears in the corner of all OOU articles on the site. The Wookieepedia goes a couple steps further and has icons not only for OOU articles, but also for each era of time, as well as featured articles. I think this would be a great idea for Wiki 24 and, despite the tedious endeavor, would definitely spice things up around here.

I tried to figure out how to do this a long time ago, but didn't succeed. I even got a negative reaction from an editor on another site when asked how to go about it. If anyone's up for the task of learning how to do this or finding someone else who can, I think we could add a whole new level of aesthetic and usefulness to Wiki 24. I figure we can parallel the Wookieepedia example and have the following icons:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4
• Day 5
• Day 6
• Novels
• Comics
• Games
• Real world perspective
• Featured articles

Or perhaps icons for each specific day, rather than grouping all novels, comics and games together? I doubt we'd need any others, but I might be missing some. We wouldn't need icons for EVERYTHING, since things like prequels can be grouped with their respective seasons, of course. The criteria for use would have to be agreed upon before hand, but essentially the non-FA/RW icons would replace the "Seasons"/"Appeared in" field in the sidebar for most IU articles. Ages ago, I uploaded the images for each of the Days (Day1.png, etc.), but never got any further with the project. Feedback? --Proudhug 20:00, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

What would we do about characters? E.G. if it looked like the one on the Star Trek wiki, there wouldn't be space for all the above categories (minus real world) on someone like Jack Bauer. Why not just have ones distinguishing Real world from OOU, so that it would be easy to identify between 2 different types. SignorSimon 20:21, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

As I said, we'd parallel the Wookieepedia. Check out the Force on Wookieepedia, for an example of seven icons in a row. --Proudhug 20:42, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Yup, I thought about bringing this up too, especially in the cases of Actor, Crew, and the Deleted Scenes Character articles. I have high hopes about this. From the start I'd like to strongly recommend that the icons we use be more prominent than Wookiepedia's, which are outright miniscule. I never noticed them until now. The OOU icon used by MemoryAlpha is excellent and much more detailed.

Two questions come to mind: what icons would Ep Guides get according to this system... just the OOU and the single appropriate Day icons? And also, would we really have to remove of the "Seasons"/"Appeared in" fields in sidebars? – Blue Rook 00:44, 18 June 2008 (UTC)_talkcontribs

Well, as Simon pointed out, "Jack Bauer" himself will have a slew of icons across his page, so it might not be a good idea to make them too big. I think that it'd be wise to make them small, but brighter so they're more noticeable. Wookieepedia's are monochromatic on a monochromatic background, which is probably why you didn't notice. The yellow on black of the current .pngs that I uploaded will likely be more obvious.

To answer your questions, yes, the ep guides would get the RW icon and the DayX icon, and possibly the FA icon. And I guess we wouldn't have to remove those template fields, but it would be kind of redundant. I'm fine with leaving them in, though. --Proudhug 01:42, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

If we are suggesting having them bigger than on the Wookiepedia, then I think we might have problems with Jack, who would have practically every one on his page. I'm not sure of a solution to this, unless they stay small, which personally I would not like as much. SignorSimon 06:26, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Gentlemen, is micro-tiny. If we're going to go run around tagging everything with these, let's make it an effort that will be noticed! I'd say 1.5x larger at least. Even at that size, Jack's article will be perfectly fine. – Blue Rook 13:29, 18 June 2008 (UTC)_talkcontribs

How is this micro-tiny? It's about 1.5 times the size of the mark-up buttons in the edit window. The icons will serve pretty much the exact same purpose. Clicking on the "1" will bring you to the "Day 1" page, clicking on the "FA" (or whatever) will bring you to the "Featured articles" page, etc. It's a quick reference to see which things this article is associated with, and provide an easy link to it. Like I said, we can still keep the "Seasons"/"Appeared in" fields in the sidebar, and the numbers in that are even smaller than these icons. I don't get how you guys think these are too small.

Anyway, this is all a moot point until we figure out how to do this. Afterwards, we can agree upon a size. I think that the yellow-on-black will automatically make it more visible than Wookieepedia's. --Proudhug 14:55, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Has anyone gotten a chance to look into this yet? --Proudhug 01:06, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

I looked at the templates on Wookiepedia and MAlpha: I couldn't figure out how they got the buttons to float up there. They must have done something complicated that isn't particularly obvious. If you want it done that way, I suppose someone could just ask one of their admins?

The alternative would be to just have these proposed buttons in a designated, isolated space at the traditional top of the article. But then they're not float-y.– Blue Rook 03:59, 23 June 2008 (UTC)_talkcontribs

I think it would look more professional and less clumsy if we could get them floating at the top. Proudhug, I'm much more up for you idea of them being yellow on black making them more obvious, I think that wil greatly improve them. SignorSimon 06:40, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Is this coming along? --SignorSimon _{(talk/contribs/email)} 21:58, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

After my initial look into it, I came to conclusion that it was over my head. Unless Proudhug has made progress, I'm pretty sure this idea has just been on the back burner for awhile. I still think we should do it eventually though. – Blue Rook 21:30, 1 September 2008 (UTC)_talkcontribs

UPDATE: I just made a bit of progress on this. See the Wiki 24:Sandbox for the update, and look at the top right using the Monaco default (I have no idea what this looks like in monobook). I found a way to make one of those DayX.png's float to the top, like we talked about. However, I currently can't make it work with more than 1 of them. And we must not even think about undertaking this project unless we can get a bunch of them to work at the same time. – Blue Rook 23:15, 8 September 2008 (UTC)_talkcontribs

Amazing work, Blue Rook!!! It works fine in both Monaco and Monobook. I added a second icon and it works perfectly. Congratulations. How did you figure it out? Now we just need to decide which other icons to use and what the criteria for each one is. Oh, and the images should link to link to the Day article, rather than the image. --Proudhug 23:30, 8 September 2008 (UTC)