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Wikipedia is getting a new look

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Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#161

Post by exacube »

krick wrote: post #147

I'm pretty confident I don't want this. I'd like to be proven wrong, but there was maybe a couple of cases among hundreds when perfectly working UI was actually improved instead of fucking broken by "getting a new look". What I actually would like to be improved is how the data is represented internally. Let's face it, it has been a long time since Wikipedia has become the largest and most accessible knowledge base i…

Friend, they are using data and research to improve their UI. Thinking that "other products didnt do it well so you shouldn't try" is extremely unproductive.

It's also not productive to argue for a vastly more difficult and different area, like their data model, during a topic of refreshing UI..

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#163

Post by andrepd »

systemvoltage wrote: post #77
andrepd wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree very much in principle. The wikipedia desktop site is beautiful, functional, fast, and doesn't change every 6 months to chase trends (unlike every god-damn website today it seems). That being said I don't understand why the sidebar should be collapsible (and collapsed by default). It's just an extra click to access functionality with some people rely on (languages, for example, being probably one of the most…

Design should not be trendy. It is not fashion. I hope we don't bloat up wikipedia pages with too much whitespace. Getting of borders, "minimal" looks bother me so much because they're sacrificing layout for aesthetics. There is a reason why borders exist. It is a line segment that separates logically laid out content into groups. I want Wikipedia to stay the same even if it is not ideal. There is a lot of legacy and…

With regards to line width, I don't understand 100% what you're saying. You agree that it is a problem, not because of aesthetics but because of readability. But then how do you propose to solve it? The only solutions are either increase font size (messing up things since now font size is tied to monitor width), or pad the sides with whitespace (what they're doing).

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#164

Post by trynewideas »

MediaWiki has a skin system, and judging from other comments here this appears to be treated as a new skin, or an iteration of the already default "Vector" skin.

There are several skins that have tried to tackle some of these problems in the past, notably Foreground: https://foreground.wikiproject.net/wiki/Main_Page

Refreshed: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Refreshed

and Timeless, which was a quasi-Wikimedia project: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Timeless, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Winter

which all tried to be responsive rather than using the MobileFrontend extension and splitting the site into two separate device-specific skins.

You can append `?useskin=skinname` on Wikipedia, or any MediaWiki site, to switch the current view to the given skin. For instance, Timeless is installed on wikipedia.org, so you can see what it looks like by going to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Bader_Ginsburg?useskin=ti...

The list of installed skins is on the wiki's Special:Version page.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#166

Post by lultimouomo »

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…

> I almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does)

Pretty much every non-native english speaker uses it all the time.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#167

Post by [deleted] »

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

#168

Post by bawolff »

krick wrote: post #147

I'm pretty confident I don't want this. I'd like to be proven wrong, but there was maybe a couple of cases among hundreds when perfectly working UI was actually improved instead of fucking broken by "getting a new look". What I actually would like to be improved is how the data is represented internally. Let's face it, it has been a long time since Wikipedia has become the largest and most accessible knowledge base i…

I think the current efforts in this regard are focused on https://wikidata.org and to a lesser extent the new (planning stages only so far) abstract wikipedia project https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia .

Those are both the opposite of an incremental approach but i'd be curious what you think of them.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#169

Post by wyxuan »

unethical_ban wrote: post #146

I don't get it. On desktop, collapsing the left bar does nothing. It doesn't provide space, it doesn't enhance the viewability of the main content. It is purely aesthetic. In that sense, it doesn't harm me, but I wonder what kind of person needs it. The second thing I notice is that it removes borders, further eliminating visual cues on header/sidebar/main content. It's a blob of white with paragraphs. It feels less…

They say in the user research survey that it's for accommodating people new to english/learners.
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