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Explore Wikipedia's New Look

wikimediafoundation.org

21–30 of 288 posts

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#22
post #9

Have been using this new theme since beta. I love the much cleaner look more than the previous one. One can always tune the CSS yourself at the user's preference near the theme selector. The only thing I need to adjust to my liking is to limit the line width: main#content { max-width: 40em; } For those who hate it: you will always have the option to switch back to the old theme. I really hope any website could be as…

How do you make the max-width apply permanently to a website on chrome?

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#23
I really like it.

Mostly the repurposing of the left side for the table of contents, but also the width reduction. I only use half of my screen for my browser already, and on many pages, lines are just insanely long.

Personally, I nevery really minded having open space on websites. I never felt it made reading worse. Contrary, pages with little whitespace felt cramped and I lost my position now and then. But I understand that other people will feel differently about that.

I'd stil like the language selector below the table of contents in the sidebar.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#24

Initial reactions from watching the gif, coming in cold, having not seen the new design: 2003: Ouch. Yeah, that's bad. 2005: Great. 2011: Not worse. Maybe a little better. I have a vague recollection that some things that aren't well-showcased by a still got better with this one, but the still is at least not-offputting compared with '05. 2022: LOL are you serious? You cannot be serious. Please tell me this is unfini…

> When you are logged in to Wikipedia, the updated header will move with you as you scroll

We need to stage some kind of intervention with web designers. There can't be a single person on the planet who actually likes this anti-feature. Why on Earth do they keep doing it?

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#25
post #23

I really like it. Mostly the repurposing of the left side for the table of contents, but also the width reduction. I only use half of my screen for my browser already, and on many pages, lines are just insanely long. Personally, I nevery really minded having open space on websites. I never felt it made reading worse. Contrary, pages with little whitespace felt cramped and I lost my position now and then. But I unders…

I wish they'd let the old sidebar display as a third column if the viewport's wide enough. However, this:

> I'd stil like the language selector below the table of contents in the sidebar.

would also cover most of the reason I wish they'd do that.

[EDIT] Incidentally, what ever happened to 3-column layouts? They could keep the site menu on the left and stick the TOC on the right (keeping it visible all the time is definitely an improvement, and the thing I like most about this redesign). We used those layouts a ton when 800x600 4:3 was still a common monitor resolution & ratio, so surely it'd be fine on 16:9 and 16:10 monitors with 3x or more the pixels.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#28

Why is everyone moving to so much white space? I wish there was more of an emphasis on information density on the modern web.

Because it emphasizes the distinction between different parts of a website which in turn makes it easier to focus on individual things.

Why are so many people against white space when it hasn't been overdone? Obviously "overdone" means different things to different people but in this case the information that matters is still pretty dense.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#29
post #8

For people who don't like the new look, you can go to preferences->Appearance and select 'Vector (Legacy)'. It does require you to login first which is annoying but at least you can easily go back to the old look. Edit: You can also have it take up the entire width by hitting the button in the bottom right. Doesn't seem to remember the change for me though so hopefully they add that in soon.

> You can also have it take up the entire width by hitting the button in the bottom right. Doesn't seem to remember the change for me though so hopefully they add that in soon.

Ooh good spot. That fixes my one issue, the bizarrely narrow column width.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#30

Details on the design process: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme... - On Wikipedia, and any MediaWiki installation, you can add the useskin query parameter to the URL to change skins on a page, even when not logged in. Current (vector-2022): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/59th_Academy_Awards?useskin=ve... Previous (vector): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/59th_Academy_Awards?useskin=ve... Olde…

Looks like my analysis on the other post using Wikiless for comparison is wrong: the new theme does transfer about 50% more data and has double the uncompressed "weight" that the previous one did, for this article. Memory use similar, bouncing between about 215 and 230MB.
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