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Explore Wikipedia's New Look

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Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#111

Post by layer8 »

psacawa wrote: post #6

Good: - Sidebar for navigation Bad: - Wasted screen space - Other languages are not available as a simple anchor tag anymore. They are hidden behind elements. It's annoying for readers who consult their own language and en.wikipedia.org in the same session. It breaks my bookmarklet to change languages, which depended on something like `document.querySelectorAll('a')`

Yes, switching languages not being a single click any more is a major usability regression. They should at least allow to configure a set of “favorite” languages that can be directly accessed.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#112

Post by debesyla »

nsajko wrote: post #52
ashton314 wrote: post #7

My initial take: I actually like this a lot. The body text is narrower which makes for easier reading. The sidebar with an updating highlight of current place in document is really nice too. I don't mind the "wasted space": Wikipedia is primarily about reading, and any well typeset book or web page should have generous margins so the line length is not too long.

Text width is important, but this is not a solution, zooming and changing browser window geometry is.

I'm sorry, but zooming is just... dumb... at least for me, sorry. Having a giant text doesn't help the readability - at least for me :( And it's not like changing window size only when visting Wiki is a good solution too - it's nuisance to change window size when you came for a quick 30 second read. At least for me.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#113

Post by ghghgfdfgh »

chazeon wrote: 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…

> you will always have the option to switch back to the old theme.

The only issue is, you need to log in to do this. I don't want to have to log in to a website that I read, and never edit, to get rid of the giant distracting table of contents.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#114

Post by phs318u »

trynewideas wrote: post #12

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…

This really should be the top comment on this post. Incredibly useful, and the last link shows that most of these skins are being actively maintained.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#115

Post by [deleted] »

karaterobot wrote: post #20

I don't need a header to follow me down the page, in fact I'd prefer it not to. On the very rare occasion when I need to scroll all the way to the top of the page, I have no problem figuring out how to do that. Feels like they're introducing a persistent UI element without a benefit. Benefit to me, anyway. Maybe they heard from a lot of users who were having trouble remembering where the header was, I can't say. I do…

[deleted]

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#116

Post by [deleted] »

yamtaddle wrote: post #11

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…

[deleted]

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#119

Post by anomaly_ »

xeyownt wrote: post #55

Wikipedia is really becoming awesome, and for me is really a Wonder of the modern world. Combined with tools like ChatGPT (or improved variants) for high quality translation of any article in any language, or combining submissions in several languages, or to get summaries or interactive explanations on some subject, this will become the most powerful tool of knowledge in history.

Generally agree, although I've noticed a lot more normative language creep into articles ("unfortunately", "unluckily", "helpfully", etc) that really have no place in a resource purporting to be encyclopaedic.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#120

Post by smarkov »

ohCh6zos wrote: post #34
smarkov wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I took some quick measurements. The previous version leaves 2% of my browser window as whitespace containing no images or text. By comparison, the new version is 53% whitespace. That seems pretty extreme to me.

You must be referring to the constrained width of the page, you can change that in the preferences if you really prefer having the text cover your whole screen.

There's a reason we have a character limit per line when writing code - it's much easier to read and understand short chunks of vertical text. Personally, I find it far more comfortable reading text which doesn't go above 600-900px in width and this has been a well known UX/UI guideline for the last 10 years. Having your eyes go from the far left to the far right of your screen is also very straining on any >21" screen.

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