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Wikipedia is getting a new look

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Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#261

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

ziftface wrote: post #248
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.

The size and amount of JS doesn't really matter. Whether it's well written and integrated matters. How many round-trips it introduces matters.

The stuff that gives JS a bad reputation is sites that slap together nested widgets that each load their resources sequentially.

If you serve a 1 MB blob of all_the_things.min.js on the first page load, then gzip reduces that to ~300 KB, which will take ~2.5 seconds to load on a 1 Mbps connection, and then it will likely be cached.

If you serve a widget that loads another widget that adds a third widget, on the other hand, elements will keep popping in and your user experience will suck.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#262

Post by ehavener »

mywittyname wrote: post #231
WWLink wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Opening the dev tools works

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#263

Post by grishka »

ziftface wrote: post #256
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.

These changes are driven by actual issues actual end users were having, as opposed to the usual "we want this feature [no one asked for] to be used more so we gave it more exposure [at the expense of the UX]". That's what software development should be like. You serve your users. Not the other way around.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#265

Post by sjy »

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…

> MediaWiki is pretty much a blogging engine, article content and structure is restricted by the guidelines only, not by the engine. This is good, and at the early stages it was the only possible solution, since there is so much that can be useful in an encyclopedia article.

I wonder whether there is a fundamental trade-off here. The track record of expert systems and structured knowledge bases is not great. Capturing data in these systems is relatively hard and expensive and therefore none of them have become as detailed as Wikipedia (cf. Wikidata). We also know that the task of giving structure to our own implicit knowledge by writing it down, even in a way that is not machine-accessible, is difficult and time-consuming. It may not be possible to create machine-accessible knowledge bases without “front-loading” the work of giving structure to that knowledge. Knowledge bases that require this to be done may never be as detailed and comprehensive as a less structured resource like Wikipedia, just as Wikipedia will never be as detailed and comprehensive as the (even less machine-readable) sum of all human knowledge distributed over the set of surviving brains and texts.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#266

Post by spixy »

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…

I made extension that does exactly that if you want

https://github.com/spixy/NoMoreMobile/blob/master/README.md

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#267

Post by rovr138 »

gnomewascool wrote: post #209
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.

If you have a Wikipedia account, you can go to Preferences > Appearance[0], and choose a different skin. AFAICT "Monobook" and "modern" have unlimited content width. If you don't then you can append ?useskin=modern to each article URL. (You can do it automatically with a redirect extension.) Alternatively you can inject the following CSS (e.g. with Stylus): .mw-content-container { max-width: none !important; } (The s…

Apparently you can add the CSS to your account based on, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24571570

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#268

Post by est31 »

monkeypizza wrote: post #58
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.

Details on this: This is a restyled version of wikipedia content that looks a lot better. They have a browser extension that redirects you to the wikiwand version of the same page, which is the same content with much nicer formatting. It really looks quite a bit better. Caveats: you have to trust a non-wikipedia site to keep their copy up to date, not to info-mine you, and if you quickly send someone a link, they may…

On the second link, it fits all onto my screen. On the first link, I have to scroll. Why is this better? Sure it looks "nice" but if I want to look at nice things there are other websites. I want wikipedia to be useful, not look nice.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#269

Post by giddhhgcfygfg »

eepp wrote: post #175
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…

For English-French translation in Québec, have a look at http://m.gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/index.aspx

Just out of interest, I tried "electronics packaging" (which other sources seem to indicate is called either "habillage" or "packaging" in French). I got this http://m.gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ficheOqlf.aspx?Id_Fiche=1893553... result which says "electronics packaging designer" translates to "concepteur d'assemblage électronique." So now I'm not sure what to think. The suggested translation doesn't include the word "habillage" which I previously thought was the term I needed.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#270

Post by capableweb »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #261
ziftface wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The size and amount of JS doesn't really matter. Whether it's well written and integrated matters. How many round-trips it introduces matters. The stuff that gives JS a bad reputation is sites that slap together nested widgets that each load their resources sequentially. If you serve a 1 MB blob of all_the_things.min.js on the first page load, then gzip reduces that to ~300 KB, which will take ~2.5 seconds to load on…

On a US-normal laptop 1MB of JS might not matter too much. But for a world-normal laptop + smartphone, the size of the bundle does matter, not just for bandwidth but for performance as well. Larger JS scripts takes longer time to parse so if you have a lower power device, it still gonna suck.

Everything around your program matters, but for different audiences. Wikipedias reach is huge, and getting it to work and work well, for the lowest common denominators (think ~10-40 USD smartphones) is a pretty big job which includes thinking about sizes of all kinds.

Edit: Ignore me, seems you're not actually replying to anything specific in the comment before you, so this all seems off-topic now.

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