Wikipedia is getting a new look • Hacker News Board

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#251

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 8:59 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #56

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 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…

This is the change I understand the least. If it was about actually collapsing the sidebar I'd understand, but it seems to literally just hide features and replace them with a useless grey area.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#252

Post by vvanpo » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 9:00 PM UTC

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.

Who does that? I think most people browse the web with many tabs open at once, and switch between them constantly. I don't think it should be on the user to resize their browser viewport every time they switch tabs to maintain a comfortable measure. That's the website's responsibility.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#253

Post by iso8859-1 » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 9:00 PM UTC

trynewideas wrote: post #164

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 pro…

If you have a user, you can set the skin permanently on

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

I use Monobook, which is more compact than the default (Vector). It used to be the default.

Having a user also enables you to toggle "Gadgets" which can provide productivity boosts, especially for editors.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#254

Post by watwut » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 9:00 PM UTC

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.

I don't maximize anything, but site that expects me to raise browser is obnoxious. It is not the only tab and idon't want to resize especially separately for each

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#255

Post by choo-t » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 9:00 PM UTC

trynewideas wrote: post #164

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 pro…

There are also `?useskinversion=1` and `?useskinversion=2` which are useful to force the use of the legacy version of skins.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#256

Post by ziftface » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 9:03 PM UTC

grishka wrote: post #240

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…

Agreed. Thinking about it, it actually seems like a major achievement that even after so long, Wikipedia's design doesn't feel clunky or unintuitive. I still think of this as the "new" design, and I'm still happy with it.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#257

Post by toxik » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

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…

PSA: old.reddit.com is so much better in these regards. I use it on my phone too, with some custom css to make things bigger.

There is also i.reddit.com.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#258

Post by tomrod » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 9:05 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…

Also, tables on mobile.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#259

Post by tsimionescu » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

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…

> His examples are pretty embarrassing

Some of the political ones show what is more easily described as bias, but his points about Global Warming or the MMR vaccine show exactly why "NPOV" for any extent is a bad idea, and why the new policy of "avoiding false balance" actually makes a lot of sense.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#260

Post by giddhhgcfygfg » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

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…

As a couple of other responses have indicated, this is not a reliable way to translate terms.

Another bit of anecdotal evidence on translation: I recently wanted to find the idiomatic French for "electronics packaging." Google Translate gets it wrong, and there's no French wiki page to refer to. The source that came up with the goods was the "translations in context" snippets here: https://www.linguee.com/english-french/translation/electroni...