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Wikipedia is getting a new look

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Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#341

Post by DonCopal »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #250
seppel wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On mobile wikipedia site go to hamburger icon - settings and then Expand all sections

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#342

Post by ogurechny »

amirkdv wrote: post #135
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 (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 guess monolingual people simply don't understand some things. That there is so much information not represented in English Wikipedia, or, say, that some foreign person with a stub article is many times more valuable, interesting, relevant than other foreign person with a decent article (when it is clear from the content in another language). Or that “information on the internet” doesn't simply appear out of nowhere, that people work on it, and the process is far from being optimal or comprehensive (never was, and never will be, sadly).

The difference of perspectives is also quite enlightening. I'm not talking about obvious transitory trifles like Obama vs Trump vs Clinton — it is pathetic that a free encyclopedia, of all things, wastes so much time on those, — or who's at war with whom for which reasons. I mean deeper differences in the world view. So there's some “highly controversial” (whatever this means) topic, and there is a completely regular article on it in other language, no signs of editing wars or flame wars, doesn't seem all that important altogether. You obviously start to meditate on why it couldn't be written the same way in the first language.

Just like many pop-science fans believe that the cardboard presented to them is a “real science” and the only true world view, most people talking about “approaching neutrality” assume that basically everything can be analyzed from the same common base, and, of course, their own beliefs are that common base. This, obviously, is not a good way to understand anything that belongs to a different culture.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#343

Post by 0xy »

toxik wrote: post #257
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.

New reddit feels like they hired 6 junior React developers and put a gun to their head telling them to rewrite the website in React in 6 months or else.

It's unbelievably slow.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#344

Post by DonCopal »

pmachinery wrote: post #110
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’ll also note that they definitely have changed some UX stuff over the past 10 years. The mouseover popup/tooltip for links showing a brief snippet of other articles is so great that I find it irritating when other sites don't have it.

The problem for me was that when opening links with Vimium, it also activates that popup, thereby obstructing the text. In the end I had to turn off the popup, good thing it can be disabled.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#345

Post by seppel »

howlgarnish wrote: post #339
msla wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That can't be true because the mobile version doesn't allow access to all of Wikipedia's functionality, such as talk pages, unless they've made some serious changes. (More precisely, I don't remember there being any way to get from an article to the article's talk page without editing the URL in the mobile version.)

This was fixed quite some time ago, there's now a Discussion tab/link on the mobile version.

Can you tell me you I can get there, e.g., here? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test

The work "discuss" does not show up in the source code, you can check "curl https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test | grep -i discuss"

The discussion is called "talk" on the desktop version, but it is also missing on the mobile one. Or there is some javascript trickery going on, but I clearly dont get it.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#346

Post by DonCopal »

lultimouomo wrote: post #166
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 (and I have a feel almost no one does) Pretty much every non-native english speaker uses it all the time.

We've witnessed a typical example of an American mindset.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#347

Post by jessriedel »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #334
Kuinox wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then make a special UI that editors/authors can enable in their preferences...

'Editors' and 'readers' is not a binary dichotomy. One of the great things about Wikipedia is that anyone who happens to be reading an article and notices an error can correct it without much friction.

This is mostly only important insomuch as it helps recruit new editors. As a fraction of effort, those drive-by non-logged-in edits are a trivial contribution.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#348

Post by davidivadavid »

pferde wrote: post #195
davidivadavid wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because I don't want to spend all day resizing my browser when I switch tabs?

I want websites that are made to be read to optimize for legibility and comfort, not for "not wasting screen space."

As I type this comment on HN, the right hand side of the text box where I type my comment is entirely empty.

Should the text box be full-width so it fills the screen and doesn't "waste space"? Hell no. It would be a pain in the ass to read my comment as I type it.

I don't know about you, but I'm very seldom (never?) reading more than one column of text at a time. Therefore, as I'm reading, anything else on my screen is "wasted".

Doesn't matter if it's white space or anything else.

It seems like we can't avoid "wasting space."

To see the absurdity of that metric, why don't you just make your window as small as possible all the time so you're never wasting any space? Why don't you reduce the font size to 1 pt so you don't waste space with fonts that are comically large?

I must admit that logic kind of escapes me, since it misses the most basic purpose behind reading on websites.

Now, I'm not unfamiliar with the regular HN comments about how everything is "dumbed down" and it's all about "information density" and cramming everything in one screen should be the be all and end all of design.

Unfortunately that opinion also seems to emanate from people who can't substantiate their preference with anything else than appeals to "power user" aesthetics, with very few actual use cases justifying it.

These are mostly ego-based arguments I tend to dismiss when discussing design decisions.

What does a screenful of text allow you to do that you can't do with a better proportioned column of text?

Unless you're the Flash, in my experience, absolutely nothing.

As far as saying the experience of reading properly should be left to the user/reader, I simply disagree. I'd rather benefit from the skills of designers and typographers presenting the content for me in the best manner than relying on hacks like resizing my window to get a decent experience.

I don't expect to go to a restaurant and be thrown ingredients for me to customize them _my_ way, I want my food cooked deliciously. And I want my content formatted properly and elegantly.

P.S. Note that your argument is entirely symmetric: if you don't want to "waste space" on a fixed width website... why don't you resize your window?

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#349

Post by simias »

tasogare wrote: post #151
thaumasiotes wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's secret on mobile. I had the same problem - I wanted to switch languages on mobile wikipedia, but the page appears to provide no way to do that. Functionality that has been carefully designed so you won't find it isn't really an improvement over functionality that isn't there.

> Functionality that has been carefully designed so you won't find it The button is labeled 文A, which is quite common for translation service, and is just under an article title so it’s literally the most visible UI element. It’s difficult to make it more accessible than that...

I only learned about it when somebody pointed it out to me in an HN thread a couple of years ago, like the parent. The button is small and I think since I don't speak Chinese or Japanese my brain tends to skip Chinese characters as I assume that whatever they convey is not aimed at me. It's also alone on the left-hand side, with no decoration or styling showing that it's interactive.

A flag icon or simply some more explicit text would be vastly easier to understand for me, especially if it actually looked like an interactive element.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#350

Post by grishka »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #338
grishka wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and I never liked businesses, especially IT ones. Also why I can't find a job for 1.5 years now — can't fathom making someone already rich even richer as opposed to making the world better. Just imagine how amazing the world would be if the creators of most of the things we use every day weren't obsessed with making more money than what they know what to do with but instead with improving the design of said thing…

> Also why I can't find a job for 1.5 years now — can't fathom making someone already rich even richer as opposed to making the world better. Have you considered working for your government or a non-profit?

> your government

I'd rather work for Facebook than get involved with this dictatorship universally hated by at least my entire generation.

> a non-profit

Thought of it. Don't know of any, sadly, and there aren't many anyway. Someone told me about Mozilla when I left my last job, but that was before covid, they didn't do remote and I don't want to relocate, and now it's in quite a turmoil.

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