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

381–390 of 529 posts

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#381

Post by grumple »

systemvoltage wrote: post #225
grumple wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Wikipedia is difficult to read due to the small font and large column width. Even with the updated versions (I checked French and Heb…

Use Ctrl(Cmd) and + sign to zoom.

I'm aware, thanks, I'm a developer. That makes the column width wider as well. What you want is a thin column and a large font size, and you can't expect regular users to zoom in.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#382

Post by epicide »

systemvoltage wrote: post #320
epicide wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You make good points. There is a wiggle room between column widths. https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/13724/reco... Somewhere between 80-110 cpl should be adequate to satisfy most deviations in sizes. This "buffer" factor can be accounted for when designing for resizeable interfaces. Column sizes don't have to be absolutely rigid and pixel perfect. Scaling can be tackled by basing everything on em-uni…

Also very good points.

I'll admit I'm not up to speed with a lot of CSS, myself. I'll definitely be looking into how to better use columns.

While I think frameworks can be helpful to keeping a standard look and feel to the web, I would definitely agree that they're often used as a crutch.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#383

Post by grumple »

msla wrote: post #307
grumple wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Wikipedia is difficult to read due to the small font and large column width. Even with the updated versions (I checked French and Heb…

> Wikipedia is difficult to read due to the small font and large column width. Narrow columns make text hard to read due to the eye being unable to see whole sentences at once. It's like the "Dick and Jane" books of old: "See Spot! See Spot Run! Run Spot Run!" Books for adults aren't written like that (as print novels attest) and there's a good reason.

What? That's the exact opposite effect that happens with wide columns. With a wide column, your eyes have to scan all the way left to right. With a narrow column, you don't have to scan as much.

Also the largest "adult" books (non-textbooks) that I have take up about 1/5 of my 43" 4k monitors screen. If you aren't adding a healthy text margin, my eyes have to scan left to right twice as much as with a book. If you want to talk about novels - my screen is 8 times as wide as them, so they are naturally using much narrower columns than most websites.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#384

Post by wraptile »

Honeslty I was never a fan of sticky headers and this one [1] is no exception. Is it really worth cluttering the reading space when you can reach search in your browser's bar or just pressing the home button to scroll up instead?

Generally pop-ups are bad design for power users. If there's free space why not have it expanded? Instead add distraction-free-mode when clicking certain keyboard button or shortcut the article is expanded and all of the clutter hidden.

My general wikipedia workflows heavily rely on search, with proposed pop-up redesigns for languages and ToC now I have to do numerous clicks rather than just searching for "Français" and clicking enter if I want the french article.

Finally the article mentioned that there should be width limit and it was always sore thumb of mine - how can something that has 200 characters per line be read efficiently? There should be configurable limit with a more sane default.

1 - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Search_prototype_for_the...

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#385

Post by ROARosen »

wraptile wrote: post #384

Honeslty I was never a fan of sticky headers and this one [1] is no exception. Is it really worth cluttering the reading space when you can reach search in your browser's bar or just pressing the home button to scroll up instead? Generally pop-ups are bad design for power users. If there's free space why not have it expanded? Instead add distraction-free-mode when clicking certain keyboard button or shortcut the arti…

Try the Wikipedia mobile site https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ which basically solves most of your issues including the sidebar and wide paragraphs.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#386

Post by glandium »

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 do 1. quite often, but I've also noticed that sometimes, the list of languages the term is available in varies between languages, which makes no sense to me.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#387

Post by simula67 »

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…

> Learning about historical events where there are multiple inevitably biased narratives

Not just historical events. For example, Vladimir Putin's Russian page looks very different from the English page. If I suspect bias, one quick check I always do is to read the page from another language using Google Translate. Does not always work, but sometimes you get more information.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#388

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#389

Post by 3131s »

fireattack wrote: post #354
rasz wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is room for improvement here. Wiki could detect language preferences based on accept-language Header. "en-US,en;q=0.9,pl;q=0.8" is a pretty good indication I want English and Polish translations to be the first one listed. Alternatively/additionally you could let logged in users define sort order/preferences. As is now I have to inject ['.vector-menu-content-list .interlanguage-link.interwiki-en', '.vector-menu…

They already adjust the list by the frequency you visit them. They don't by default show all 100+ language links anymore for a while.

Right, I did not like this change at all...

I use the langlinks across many languages, way more so than the average user so my use case is different.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#390

Post by apricot »

rtsil wrote: post #371
giddhhgcfygfg wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-fre…

Linguee is not a reference either for English to French, simply because most of the side-by-side translations it uses are bad translations; and also because it mixes French and Canadian sources, which are sometimes completely unrelated to the point that a native French won't understand a Canadian translation and vice-versa. Deepl, from the same company, is much better and is currently the best online translator.

France French and Canadian French are not that different and are certainly mutually intelligible, kind of like US English and Australian English. (Except of course if you're a rude Parisian and act like any accent except yours is undecipherable).
Post reply on HN