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Wikipedia is getting a new look

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Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#231

Post by mywittyname »

WWLink wrote: post #223
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…

> when paragraphs are that wide they become harder to read I hope I don't sound like a jerk saying this, but resizing the browser window is the key. I dunno why some people maximize everything on their computer - that's a really inefficient use of space. I wish more websites wouldn't try to force formatting on me and just let me resize my window.

Well, I use tabs and not every website looks best at the same size. So I don't think the approach works. (FWIW, I'm also a non-full-screen user).

But you're probably on to something. I would be cool if the web browser would allow you to adjust the body size of the document without adjusting the window size.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#232

Post by komali2 »

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…

Not only does wikipedia need to concern itself with highly established user flows ("sure it's not perfect but at this point I'm used to it" * millions of users), but I think a project like Wikipedia is A Genuinely Important Thing and therefore can't afford to fuck around with UI "experiments" like Reddit does and like Digg catastrophically tried. Trying to both provide a free online encyclopedia of Pretty Much Everything We Know and make it available to as many humans as possible, while also doing UI experiments on those users, seems too ambitious. Let reddit and facebook and google turn their users into lab rats. In ten years Wikipedia can take one or two actually useful bits of information generated from those experiments and implement them, as they're doing here.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#233

Post by waldofrank »

blewboarwastake wrote: post #152
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 second using Wikipedia for translating, most of the time is better than using a translator or using a dictionary and sometimes is the only option for more technical or specific terms. I don't use it for comparing between languages much because I'm bilingual and my native tongue Wikipedia is not that big, but sometimes is really interesting to see the different perspectives.

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

#234

Post by Slackwise »

mcnesium wrote: post #200

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;…

Actually, if you have a Wikipedia account, you can save custom CSS (and even JS?!) to your account:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsec...

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#235

Post by CydeWeys »

bosswipe wrote: post #197
Eiriksmal wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In even simpler terms, the use of editorial judgment is required to write an encyclopedia. Always has been, always will be. A website free of editorial judgment looks like 8chan, not an encyclopedia.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#236

Post by thaumasiotes »

MayeulC wrote: post #220
kossTKR wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure 99 out of a 100 don't know what "文A" means. I've had the same complaint, - never once did it occurs to me that "文A" meant translation. This to me is a testament to the fact that most buttons should actually be text unless extremely common like the hamburger menu, but even that's debatable.

Well, it has one merit at the very least: regardless of the interface language, you will find that button.

That isn't true either. The button has no borders nor any other indication that it's a button; it appears to be a simple decoration on the mobile page.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#237

Post by cxr »

systemvoltage wrote: post #74
m0ck wrote: post #43

Just in case someone here is not aware of Wikiwand: https://www.wikiwand.com/ I use it for 2 years now and it works just right.

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 +

> Also large fonts need to die

It's possible that you're browsing on some configuration that makes Wikiwand display "large fonts" (mobile device? even then I haven't been able to reproduce), but Wikiwand isn't using large fonts. In fact, articles' font-size is set to 100% of the UA's preferred font-size, and then they use use a third-party font ("Lora") which actually makes text smaller than your typical serif font rendered at the same size.

> I love HN because I can see so much in one shot, can always increase fonts with Ctrl +

By the same token, you can always use Ctrl+- then for sites that use a "large font"[1], right?

Note that HN is actually screwing things up and using a "small" font. From news.css: "font-size: 9pt"(!). IMO, pulling shenanigans like that is actually pretty disrespectful to visitors. It's why I have to permanently browse HN at 133% zoom + force the rules for mobile devices to kick in. It's only at that point where text is displayed at my UA's correct size.

1. (Wikiwand excluded, for the reasons above)

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#238

Post by grawprog »

CydeWeys wrote: post #235
bosswipe wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In even simpler terms, the use of editorial judgment is required to write an encyclopedia. Always has been, always will be. A website free of editorial judgment looks like 8chan, not an encyclopedia.

Even 8chan had some level of editorial judgement, however small it was. It was there.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#239

Post by mywittyname »

systemvoltage wrote: post #203
andrepd wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Increasing font size is magnification of the entire column, so you sacrifice the vertical space along with it. Line height can't go lower after a specific point - Arial for example, with font size of 12 points needs to have enough line-height of 16 points. Again, increasing the font size is not the solution. The second point about padding the sides with whitespace causes waste of screen real-estate for no reason othe…

> At desktop size, you get 3 columns. At tablet size, 2. On the phones, its single column. There might be better solutions to this but I can't think of any.

This is makes it hard to handle flowing content. Do you add artificial pages to break up the content or does scrolling cascade up each of the columns?

Then there's the issue of typesetting being an NP hard problem. Even Word needs a lot of hand-holding when using multi-column layouts because it often produces poor results.

I don't necessarily mind the excessive whitespace when I'm reading, because I prefer to not have to move my head and eyes too while reading. But having a lot of content on the page at once, like you're proposing, is really beneficial in technical situations, where I need to move between different pieces of information, like taking notes.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#240

Post by grishka »

Compared to how radically, how often, and how pointlessly most popular websites get redesigned, this is so... subtle.

When I saw the title I assumed there's going to be a full redesign, with all the bad modern web design trends like giant everything and plentiful useless whitespace. I was pleasantly surprised to find out it's not the case and they're actually keeping their dense desktop layout and making some rather minor changes to it.

That's the kind of miracle you get when you aren't optimizing your product for KPIs and stock value.

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