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Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

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Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#382
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't so bad but consider new Reddit vs. old Reddit. If "new" were to become the only way to access Reddit, I would probably abandon it.

They don't need to force you to migrate, the new site pushes people into mindless meme sharing only, and completely altered the contents of the site already.

How does the new design push people to mindlessly meme share? Reddit has been like that for a decade or more at least IMO.

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#383

I discovered the other day that the mobile version of Wikipedia _while on desktop_ is AMAZING. Check this out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Yeager It's nicely justified for reading. Superfluous interface is almost entirely eliminated compared to desktop view. It's just such a clean, elegant view for reading a Wikipedia page.

You would also like simple wikis https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Yeager Adding simple just brings information down to its bones, good for quick reference and easier understanding of harder topics https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#384

I am one of those people who actually like Wikipedia the way it is. It's what I hoped the web to become. But i am sure there are people who will appreciate your effort. Thank you for your work.

Wikipedia's style is almost perfect except for one thing that bugs me: the line width in desktop style is unlimited, meaning in a big window it can be hundreds of symbols long, which is pretty bad from the readability standpoint ( https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability ).

They've changed that, but so far I've only seen the change on French Wikipedia. I think they test it on us before broader release.

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#385
post #143

I am one of those people who actually like Wikipedia the way it is. It's what I hoped the web to become. But i am sure there are people who will appreciate your effort. Thank you for your work.

On another note given that Wikipedia's content is in the open, maybe this new UI could be hosted at another domain e.g. pickypedia.org or itchypedia.org or something else funny instead of being a Chrome plugin. Chrome plugins add more unwelcome startup bloat to the web browser, and while they are super useful to fix the UI issues of commercial, copyrighted websites, Wikipedia can totally legally be replicated at anot…

You'd still need the old wikipedia to edit any articles and you'd still need a browser extension to redirect regular wikipedia links to your favorite frontend.

Also just like with open source projects, just because you are allowed to fork does not mean that you should as you could end up hurting the original project by e.g. confusing users.

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#386
post #161

I am one of those people who actually like Wikipedia the way it is. It's what I hoped the web to become. But i am sure there are people who will appreciate your effort. Thank you for your work.

Yeah this is great but I'd rather stick with the tightly wound tools at Wikimedia, they probably know what they're doing more than this anemic blasphemy

Seing as wikipedia still has a separate m. subdomain in $current_year instead of just one responsive page means any claims that they know what they are doing will need to be backed up by evidence.

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't need to force you to migrate, the new site pushes people into mindless meme sharing only, and completely altered the contents of the site already.

How does the new design push people to mindlessly meme share? Reddit has been like that for a decade or more at least IMO.

They only show a few comments on certain pages, which deemphasizes discussion. I'm not aware of any other changes to new Reddit that would do that.

Although other changes might have made things better, like changing how default subreddits work (although this applies to new and old reddit).

With the exception of a few subreddits that have made explicit rule changes (either encouraging or discouraging memes), I haven't really noticed a significant long term trend in meme-posting within subreddits.

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