Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Explore Wikipedia's New Look

wikimediafoundation.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 288 posts

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#131

Post by pessimizer »

ghghgfdfgh wrote: post #113
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.

Simple userscript to add the tags from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34431533 to the end of wikipedia URLs.

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/458494-old-wikipedia-layou...

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#132

Post by pessimizer »

Willish42 wrote: post #76

> Research has shown that limiting the width of longform text leads to a more comfortable reading experience, and better retention of the content itself. Is this actually true? I'm curious if anybody has sources for this and if it's a common UX practice. I tend to use wider windows than traditional 8:9 half-screens and this max-width practice drives me nuts.

> Is this actually true? I'm curious if anybody has sources for this and if it's a common UX practice.

As far as I can tell, the people who say this are citing each other. And can't wait to reply when you say you find it unpleasant that it's actually scientifically ideal.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#133

Post by trynewideas »

phs318u wrote: post #114
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.

All of those skins are open source and their repos are browsable on Wikimedia's Gerrit. Here's good old MonoBook: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/plugins/gitiles/mediawiki/ski...

For most old Wikimedia-maintained skins, the maintenance commits are largely automated build and translation changes, though they do still keep them kind of viable for modern features like notifications, or major architectural changes.

For example, MediaWiki 1.35 added Mustache templating: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:How_to_make_a_MediaWik...

So here's the commit to MonoBook converting it to use Mustache: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/plugins/gitiles/mediawiki/ski...

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#135

Post by aendruk »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #124
aendruk wrote: post #103

Sigh, yet another site that contorts into an absurd distortion of a mobile layout at a still spacious viewport width. Am I the only person with two windows up? Screenshot: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmaovnEHiCo6knhTPpp4XJyr5x9... This actually increased the line length.

Pardon me asking, but what font (cipher? language?) are your tab titles and menus in? I don't recognize it, and I'm familiar with quite a few ciphers. (I initially thought it was another language, but it's clearly a transliteration of English.)

It’s just a silly font, still a work in progress. Inspired by https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Nifflas/109330930338202763

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#136

Post by spartanatreyu »

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')`

> Wasted screen space

Don't fall for that mental trap. White space is not wasted space.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#138

Post by JellyBeanThief »

debesyla wrote: post #112
nsajko wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plus if I change the browser geometry, that messes up the other pages I have open in other tabs. Not to mention the other apps my TWM manages.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#139

Post by duderific »

Willish42 wrote: post #76

> Research has shown that limiting the width of longform text leads to a more comfortable reading experience, and better retention of the content itself. Is this actually true? I'm curious if anybody has sources for this and if it's a common UX practice. I tend to use wider windows than traditional 8:9 half-screens and this max-width practice drives me nuts.

This is why newspapers and magazines (if you remember those) have a columnar layout instead of just filling the whole page side to side.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#140

Post by duderific »

mpsprd wrote: post #43

The table of contents is a great addition! Whitespace/minimalist styling is of little importance as it will change with design fashions, while the table will stay a net positive.

A little odd though, that there is no left-padding in the table of contents, so the text is jammed right up against the left side of the page. Or is that just me?
Post reply on HN