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Wikipedia is getting a new look

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Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#191

Post by ryandrake »

robertoandred wrote: post #12
Thaxll wrote: post #6

I don't know why they did that, now we have empty space on the left and right, it's really useless, why is it better than using the full screen? "Our second change introduces a maximum line width to our content on pages where reading is the focus, such as article pages and discussion pages. Research has shown that limiting the width can lead to better retention of the content itself, as well as a decrease in eye stra…

So make the window narrower or get a narrower screen if you don't want to see empty space. Readability is more important.

Why not leave it to the user? If they want narrower text, they can make their window narrower. If they want wider text, they can make their window wider. This design forces "narrow" as the one true way, leaving out users who prefer to use the whole monitor they paid for.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#192

Post by 867-5309 »

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.

try changing your IP address, OS language/region and browser language to English

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#193

Post by userbinator »

davidivadavid wrote: post #145
pbronez wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are reducing maximum column width, but perhaps not as drastically as you'd wish: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Reading/We...

Yeah, I don't think 900+px is ideal for reading on a desktop computer. Better than nothing, though!

Resize the window yourself then. I get far more annoyed at sites that refuse to flow text to the desired width.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#194

Post by vaccinator »

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

I use it most often to change the language...

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#195

Post by pferde »

davidivadavid wrote: post #87
jrochkind1 wrote: post #36

The detail page for the first feature they mention, limiting line-width [1], makes me think: Wow, it sure takes a lot of analysis and discussion to make what is a pretty straightforward and simple change. (Recall, too, this has been in the works for at least a year? And still isn't deployed to English wikipedia?) Which makes me realize there's sort of an ironic situation. When a site is beginning and small, you don't…

Thanks for the link — that subject has been my #1 complaint with Wikipedia for a long time. I'm glad they're finally doing something about it, even though it seems like I still won't be happy with it — judging by the wikis where the update is active, it's still too wide. The rationale in the article is interesting, but IMO wrong — the idea that you need to balance scannability and line length suggests that line lengt…

This is what I don't get. Why not just make your browser window narrower? Wikipedia is one of increasingly smaller set of sites which have the decency of NOT WASTING MY FRIGGING SCREEN SPACE by putting text into a narrowest of columns in the middle of my screen and leaving the sides empty.

I get that line scannability is an issue for some people, but that's why _you_ can adjust the way _you_ read the article on _your_ device, without affecting _anyone else_. Web browsers, and desktop environments in general had this magic window-resizing ability for decades.

At least there are cool browser extensions like CustomCSS, which allow me to fix sites I visit often. I guess I will be adding Wikipedia there soon... :/

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#196

Post by burkaman »

amyjess wrote: post #176

So does anyone have a userscript to override the maximum line width? I have claustrophobia, and having text forced into narrow columns actively triggers it. Taking a look at the Basque Wikipedia, I can tell right here that it's completely unusable for me. I'm willing to pay real money for someone to write me a script to override it.

You can open the article in Reader View in Firefox and then set the margins to whatever you want.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#197

Post by bosswipe »

Eiriksmal wrote: post #156
amirkdv wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does) The left sidebar has two killer features for me: 1. Finding canonical translations for technical terms. You need to know what the standard way to translate "hardware acceleration" or "differentiable manifold" is in French? Go to the wikipedia page and hover over the language switcher link in the left sidebar. Done. This has become one…

I also find your first point to be a truly indispensable tool. How else do you know what they call carbon fiber in German? [0] But the second is a touchy area. In fact, Wikipedia's co-founder recently wrote a blog post detailing how its neutral point-of-view policy has flopped, in the name of fighting false balance. [1] His examples are pretty embarrassing, but more important in that Google points human "Search Quali…

I don't understand Larry Sanger's complaint about NPOV. If a neutral encyclopedia was required to list all minority points of view on every topic then nothing would be knowable. It wouldn't be able to say that the earth is round. If saying that the earth is round is biased then neutrality is worthless and not worth pursuing.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#198

Post by bonoboTP »

andrepd wrote: post #163
systemvoltage wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Or do columns like a newspaper, but it's unusual on the web.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#199

Post by cxr »

davidivadavid wrote: post #87
jrochkind1 wrote: post #36

The detail page for the first feature they mention, limiting line-width [1], makes me think: Wow, it sure takes a lot of analysis and discussion to make what is a pretty straightforward and simple change. (Recall, too, this has been in the works for at least a year? And still isn't deployed to English wikipedia?) Which makes me realize there's sort of an ironic situation. When a site is beginning and small, you don't…

Thanks for the link — that subject has been my #1 complaint with Wikipedia for a long time. I'm glad they're finally doing something about it, even though it seems like I still won't be happy with it — judging by the wikis where the update is active, it's still too wide. The rationale in the article is interesting, but IMO wrong — the idea that you need to balance scannability and line length suggests that line lengt…

> it seems like I still won't be happy with it — judging by the wikis where the update is active, it's still too wide

I'm not sure what they looked like before, but I also visited a few of the localized wikis and ended up getting a horizontal scrollbar. I know that the theme on English Wikipedia is very old and not exactly responsive, but this is not something that happens there; I get no horizontal scrollbar. Everything is sized to fit within my window, except on certain articles containing wide tables or (unfortunately) multi-column reference sections, and even then, it's limited to those elements, which overflow, and the main article contents end up sized correctly. So I have to think that whatever changes they're introducing might actually be causing new problems...

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#200

Post by mcnesium »

Using Wikipedias language switcher to translate things seems to be quite common here, so I thought I'd share how I moved the languages up on top, so I don't have to scroll down on smaller screens or when zoomed in.

In `/chrome/userContent.css` I wrote the following:

    @-moz-document domain(wikipedia.org) {
        #mw-panel {
            display: flex;
            flex-direction: column;
        }
        #mw-panel nav {
            order: 9;
        }
        #mw-panel nav#p-logo {
            order: 1;
        }
        #mw-panel nav#p-lang {
            order: 2;
        }
    }
This is only for Firefox, but imho that is the… least bad browser anyways ;)
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