Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wikipedia is getting a new look

diff.wikimedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 529 posts

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#241

Post by oblio »

userbinator wrote: post #189
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…

I don't understand why people complain about line length when that really means you should just resize the window to your preference. On the other hand, pages that stay in a narrow column in the middle when I widen the window really infuriate me, because I explicitly asked for wider columns and am not getting it.

> I don't understand why people complain about line length when that really means you should just resize the window to your preference.

Different people have different workflows. Many people I know only have 1 browser window open, always maximized, with a ton of tabs open in it. They definitely won't go about resizing the window for no good reason. I don't think any mainstream website relies on the user resizing the browser window for, what I think are, good reasons.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#242

Post by oblio »

daniel2x wrote: post #88
petters wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I use the fullscreen expandable images: 1: Go to a page. 2: Click on an image. 3: Close the image. 4: Click the browser back button. I am now at the image again. This is surprising and I cannot seem to learn this.

There is a setting to disable it. You're welcome.

Setting? Where?

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#243

Post by epicide »

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…

Print media also doesn't have to deal with: resizable windows, accessibility, user styles, navigation, mixed media, comment sections, SEO, browser compatibility, load times, or security.

I understand we are just talking about page layout, but web designers still have to simultaneously contend with everything I've listed.

You mention a solution for 3 different sizes (desktop, tablet, and phone), but a responsive site often has to subdivide further. Even so, "tablet" does not have a standard size. Rotating a tablet/phone also changes the view size.

Size is not the only usability difference between desktop and mobile devices.

Columns in such a way would likely be hell in terms of accessibility (remember, the user can change the font size).

Of course, there are (potentially) ways to solve each of those, but they will depend heavily on the individual sites' and users' needs. This brings us right back to the issue of non-standard design across sites.

I wouldn't expect well-designed print media from a web designer any more than I would expect a well-designed site from a print professional. They are different professions and problem spaces that sometimes overlap.

Instead of disparaging all web designers as unprofessional morons, perhaps consider that they balanced all of the above along with your points and still landed on a different conclusion from you.

tl;dr the user can (rightfully) control a lot of factors in how they view the web that traditional print and graphic design do not have to deal with.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#244

Post by liability »

exacube wrote: post #161
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..

> they are using data and research to improve their UI

That's what every UI/UX ''expert'' says and 99% of them are full of shit.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#245

Post by llacb47 »

Macha wrote: post #99
Animats wrote: post #7

These are the first of many changes in a long and complex process. They're raising too much money and hiring too many unnecessary people.

I was just rereading WP:CANCER again after the latest donation banner took a full screen scroll and asked me for an email when I pressed what I assumed was the dismiss nag button: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has...

rereading ... again is redundant.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#246

Post by sjy »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #188
Robotbeat wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I think Wikipedia's bar for use is pretty low. To bring it much lower (i.e. to Twitter or Facebook levels) might reduce quality because people will be more willing to make changes while requiring even less time investment. Wikipedia has wildly succeeded and mostly avoided the fate of other social media sites. We must tread very carefully to keep Wikipedia for future generations.

So these particular changes are more about the UI for viewing/consuming content than editing/creating. And I'm suspicious of the theory that a harder to use UI for editing results in higher quality content. I understand your theory that some people who would edit content maliciously or without proper care would be put off by a harder to use UI, but it's not obvious to me that it's true, or that it wouldn't be counter…

Much of the discussion in your first link seems very old. There is a link buried in there to this discussion in 2015, when it was suggested that the trend may be reversing (based on the questionable decision to focus on “active” editors making more than 100 edits a month). It would be surprising if the growth in internet use over the past decade had not increased the number of Wikipedia editors at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

I’m suspicious too, but I agree with the grandparent that we should tread very carefully. Wikipedia’s success probably has at least something to do with the fact that its development has been extremely slow and isolated from commercial web development trends.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#247

Post by petters »

petters wrote: post #59
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…

This is how I use the fullscreen expandable images: 1: Go to a page. 2: Click on an image. 3: Close the image. 4: Click the browser back button. I am now at the image again. This is surprising and I cannot seem to learn this.

Update: This is no longer the case. I can not reproduce this any more. Great!

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#248

Post by ziftface »

StillBored wrote: post #216

Please, since someone from wikipedia is probably reading this: Keep the JavaScript to a minimum. The plans aren't clear to me, but given what sites like reddit/etc have done during their "updates" the new UI's are terrible on anything that isn't a top of the line device with a screaming fast internet connection. Wikipedia (and a few other "older" sites) is such a pleasure to use as is, don't ruin it. AKA round-trippi…

The experience with js-heavy sites even on a very capable desktop is still negative. Too much js introduces bugs, latency, and lack of stability. A page like that will sometimes jump around and resize for no apparent reason.

Making wikipedia noticeably js-heavy would definitely ruin the experience.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#249

Post by qwertox »

I just hope that it doesn't get one of those reactive designs, where, when I put two browser windows side by side on a 1920px wide display, the content gets displayed in tablet mode, instead of keeping it in desktop mode.

These reactive sites have broken half of the web for me because of this.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#250

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

seppel wrote: post #126
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…

The sole critique of the UX of Wikipedia that I have is that the normal version of Wikipedia redirects you to the mobile version when using a mobile device, and changes the URL while doing so. This is why we end up with all these m.wikipedia links. The mobile version, however, does not redirect you to the normal page when using a normal computer. So people like myself constantly have to edit the "m." from wikipedia l…

Also, the mobile version collapsing the zippies, which means search doesn't work.
Post reply on HN