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Do you have any suggestions, comments or complaints about  Template:Twitter ?

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Thanks for taking the initiative here to help create this template! Since we haven’t obtained a community consensus yet for this new template, I moved it into your own user space here:  https://www.wikihow.com/User:IMQFT/Twitter

If there’s a community consensus that we would like to move forward with this new template then it can be moved back into the main template space. 

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@Eric Waiting…

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I like the idea of this and support the use of it, but I’m afraid it may clutter articles. What does everyone else think? Would it clutter articles?

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I personally like the idea of this template. Have a means to visually/graphically show what we mean to our audience is a huge plus.

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Agreed, as this helps us further improve the helpfulness of our articles.

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See, what I’m not certain about is why this is needed. I don’t focus on the Twitter articles a lot, but I don’t think there’s a ton that would need these templates? I’ll be convinced if someone can give me a good reason:stuck_out_tongue:

Also, a minor complaint, but some of these images are really hard to see (e.g. LikeMoment, Follow/Following, and Blocked) and seem slightly unneeded. I’m sure that could easily be represented by a screenshot rather than an icon that’s tough to read.

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You must check this category !

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What are your thoughts, @Matthew-Fasl ? You do work for wikiHow as a member of the tech editing team.:slight_smile:

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Hey, Everyone!

Great discussion going on here, I love it! And thanks for bringing me into the discussion, @Batreeq . I think the following template would be helpful for these articles, let me know what you all think. The 2 key things here are that we maintain an image standard when uploading the icons and that we implement them into the articles correctly in a way that flows well. 

I would suggest that the icon images should be:

  • PNG files
  • Have transparent backgrounds (These won’t always be placed on the default white background).
  • Be 30px by 30px (a little bit larger is okay since the template code will resize them in the article, but avoid anything smaller than that).
  • Uploaded under a “Fair Use” license. (Include a short note describing the process you used, i.e. “I edited this screenshot of a Twitter icon.”)
  • Readable/high contrast. Readability should always come before color consistency (simple black and transparent icons are effective/best).

As @Galactic-Radiance mentioned, some of the current icons aren’t all that easy to see and don’t stand out as much as we aim for. Many of the icons have different colors for various themes, on/off/hover states etc. so an icon’s color isn’t always consistent in the wild anyway. It’s not as important that we maintain color accuracy so much as it’s important that the images are high contrast and emphasize the icon’s design clearly. Unless the only thing that distinguishes an icon’s design from one that looks extremely similar is the color, then we should really keep the icons as black on transparent backgrounds. Once screenshots are added there will be an extra visual layer of accuracy anyway. You can see that we’re doing that for most of the Android system icons  wikihow.com/<wbr>Template:Android</wbr>  and it’s really effective when they’re displayed in the articles even though they’re just black. 

Lastly, we want to use the icons in the articles consistently, as well. So far, the way we’ve found that’s most effective is to use the icon in the first sentence of a step in the most direct way and succinct way. Then in the second sentence, we want to explain in more detail what it looks like and where it is located. This might sound a little redundant, but we need to visually describe the icons when we use them because we have readers who use our Amazon Alexa skill to access many of these articles and they listen to Alexa read the article to them out loud. So, for example, a step on how to reply to a tweet might read:

  1. Click {{twitter|reply}}. It’s the button that resembles a speech bubble on the bottom-left of the tweet you want to reply to. This opens a pop-up window for you to compose your reply.

Hopefully, that all makes sense and helps! If you guys have any comments or suggestions, let me know. I really appreciate everyone’s input:slight_smile:

-Matt