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Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

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Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#81

If you are are reading this far you probably care a lot about Wikipedia. Give generously if you can. https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/

Or don't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

Is there a way to verify that WMF has over a hundred million in reserves?

Also, why is bandwidth costing them over a million dollars a year? Is it because of edge locations or something?

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#83
IMHO the things that OP wanted should not be part of the website:

Narrower columns? Adjust the width of your browser window. Nicer Fonts? Those should be a user preference, not served by website - I see the OP agrees with this... Dark Mode? That should be a function of the DE, or maybe the browser, but not the web site.

Everything about this work says "I want to control the look of web pages on my end."

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#84
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got you, fam. https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki-start.html (I built this mostly for myself, because I find it incredibly difficult to read text that has hyperlinks and images in the text)

This is kind of incredible. Have you considered images just take up full width?

Half of cutting the images is a space saving thing.

Wikipedia is a pretty big website, and (like the rest of my web presence) I'm hosting the mirror on a single small consumer hardware server. I'm keeping all the wikipedia pages as compressed HTML, and if you look at the sources you'll see it's very bare bones, most pages are like 50 Kb, yet the total is still 21 Gb. I don't think I have the space or bandwidth for selfhosting all of wikipedia's images.

Part of this experiment is to illustrate just how ridiculously large page loads on a lot of pages. Even text-heavy ones like Wikipedia.

If you compare the HTML payload alone of these two renditions of largely the same text, it's a 50x difference. The full Wikipedia page load exceeds 1 Mb, mine isn't even 10 Kb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scamander

https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki/Scamander

That's kinda ridiculous.

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#85
post #74

I am one of those people who actually like Wikipedia the way it is. It's what I hoped the web to become. But i am sure there are people who will appreciate your effort. Thank you for your work.

I agree with you except the one pain point that Wikipedia still continues to use "m.*" sub-domains for displaying mobile content. I know most people exclusively use mobile these days but I use desktop browsers for reading more than 60% of the time and its really annoying to click on a Wikipedia link on HN/Reddit and having it open the mobile site on desktop. It's OK to use m.* subdomains instead of reactive design bu…

[flagged]

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#87
post #6

OP, thanks for making this, I bet it was fun to build. That being said, I want someone to do the opposite of what this does. Less chrome, less bytes over the wire, less predictive search, less "flatness?", less timely, more timeless .

This. What's with the fixed floating headers? Like my screen real estate isn't scarce enough? And even if not, I don't like sites treating my desktop like a phone but blown up really big.

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#88

I am one of those people who actually like Wikipedia the way it is. It's what I hoped the web to become. But i am sure there are people who will appreciate your effort. Thank you for your work.

I usually shy away from "modern redesign" but this one feels rapidly valuable both in legibility and usability.

The chasing left side TOC is really useful. The typography is slightly fancy without trying to be in your face.

The search (kbd /) is nice too.

I'd motivate the author to experiment with more stuff around accessing categories and hyperlinks in the page.

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#90
post #74

I am one of those people who actually like Wikipedia the way it is. It's what I hoped the web to become. But i am sure there are people who will appreciate your effort. Thank you for your work.

I agree with you except the one pain point that Wikipedia still continues to use "m.*" sub-domains for displaying mobile content. I know most people exclusively use mobile these days but I use desktop browsers for reading more than 60% of the time and its really annoying to click on a Wikipedia link on HN/Reddit and having it open the mobile site on desktop. It's OK to use m.* subdomains instead of reactive design bu…

I’m sure there is JS that will redirect you to non mobile, pretty sure I installed something like that and never had that issue.
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