Wikipedia is getting a new look • Hacker News Board

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#111

Post by systemvoltage » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

psychometry wrote: post #92

systemvoltage wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, this is worse in every way. Too much white space. Literally every website today needs to reduce the padding and margins by 80% and they could present the same data in dense, single page without scrolling. Also large fonts need to die. I love HN because I can see so much in one shot, can always increase fonts with Ctrl +

You can't really exceed a a certain number of characters per line without sacrificing readability and you can't restrict the line length without padding the container, so I'm not really sure what you think the goal of typography should be. It's certainly not to reduce scrolling; there is no "fold" on the web.

I like Wall Street Journal and their typography, https://wsj.com and how they write their articles. Not sure if it directly applies to Wikipedia, but I agree with your general point about typography - 80-120 character width seems ideal, any longer and it is tiring.

Perhaps we should go with columnar layout. I don't think it helps by adding a bunch of whitespace... ultimately, you're reducing the amount of information shown on a single page which could just be columnized.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#112

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 6:05 PM UTC

Uehreka wrote: post #19

If someone asked me to critique the UX of Wikipedia, the first two things I’d point out would be that I almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does) and that when paragraphs are that wide they become harder to read (especially when they snake around floated images). Not changing for 10 years, watching as some trends fade and others become law-of-the-land, and then making two changes…

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#113

Post by Ciantic » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

There appears to be a some mockup already online: https://di-collapsible-sidebar-5.firebaseapp.com/Tea if you want to preview some aspects of it.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#114

Post by em-bee » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

bakuninsbart wrote: post #95

thibran wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does) If you speak different languages, the left hand bar is very useful to switch between different language versions of an article.

I use that quite a lot, because google periodically just refuses to acknowledge that I usually want my links in English despite living in Germany. English quality is often times a bit better, but it is also useful to check in multiple languages, as sometimes you get different information, especially on more controversial topics.

or regional ones. topics that relate to the german area are usually more detailed in german. same for other areas and languages to the point that it can be worth it to use machine translation to look into a foreign local topic

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#115

Post by waldofrank » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 6:18 PM UTC

Regarding all of the comments about the importance of language links in the sidebar: if you look here you will see that the language links will be moved to a button/menu in the article header (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme...)

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#116

Post by waldofrank » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

Regarding the comments about the importance of language links in the sidebar: if you look here you can see that the language links will be moved to a button/menu in the article header — https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme....

The conclusions of the user testing show that people have a much easier time finding them in the new location.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#117

Post by p1mrx » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

I just want them to remove the "collapsible sections hiding most of the content" misfeature from the mobile interface. Every time I view a Wikipedia page on my phone, I scroll down and click Desktop, because it's easier than playing whack-a-mole with a bunch of section titles.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#118

Post by bra-ket » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

I wish instead of UI tweaks they would do something about toxic admins and power editors spreading misinformation with the assistance of kafkaesque bureaucracy and censorship.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#119

Post by lights0123 » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 6:24 PM UTC

nickosmark wrote: post #90

Wikimedia recently decided to abandon their in-house javascript framework in favor of Vue.js[0]. That doesn't mean wikipedia will turn into a vue.js single page app but they'll use it to progressively enhance some parts of the frontend or their internal tools/editors etc. Looking at some of the suggested features like the new search[1] it seems that vue.js could be used in this scenario. Does that mean they'll ship t…

I mean, the Vue.js runtime is smaller (about 73% smaller) than jQuery.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#120

Post by soneil » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

drng wrote: post #86

If you have an account (and stay logged in) you can get some of the benefits described in the article with an alternative skin (collapsed menu, limited line width, maybe a better font). Check out the options in the Appearance section of your user preferences. I like MinervaNeue (sample page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Anglo-Saxon_England... )

If you don't like being logged in, it's worth noting that's also the default interface for en.m.wikipedia.org (the mobile site, which is perfectly usable on the desktop)