OSM Wiki Skin “dark mode"

General talk
8

Dark mode is now live on the wiki following an upgrade to MediaWiki. To enable it, change the Color (beta) setting in the right sidebar from Light to either Automatic or Dark. If you don’t see a right sidebar, make sure you’re logged out or your Appearance preference is set to Vector (2022). If you still don’t see a right sidebar, click the :eyeglasses: button in the toolbar at the top of the page, to the right of the search bar.

Now for the hard part: over the years, we’ve amassed plenty of sitewide and inline CSS code that assumes what’s now the Light color scheme. This assumption breaks as soon as you switch to the Dark color scheme. Most colored boxes and color-coded templates remain blindingly bright, and text is illegible due to low contrast.

The Main Page in dark mode shows bright backgrounds behind the language bar and section headings that causes some text to be illegible.
The Main Page in dark mode shows bright backgrounds behind the language bar and section headings that causes some text to be illegible.1920×1440 200 KB

The Sidewalks page in dark mode shows bright backgrounds behind the language bar, infobox, and notice box that cause the text inside to be illegible.
The Sidewalks page in dark mode shows bright backgrounds behind the language bar, infobox, and notice box that cause the text inside to be illegible.1920×1440 219 KB

The administrators need your help in identifying templates that are garish or unreadable and fixing them to be night-compatible. Please note individual issues on this requests page or leave a note on the template’s talk page, tagging it with {{edit request}}. I’ve asked for the TemplateStyles extension so that I won’t have to centrally administer every little bit of CSS that appears on the site in one massive file.

On that note, we have an ongoing vote on adding several new administrators to the site, mostly in order to take care of boring cleanup tasks that users with normal rights are unable to help with.

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