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Explore Wikipedia's New Look

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Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#201

Post by sdevoid »

slimginz wrote: 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.

Thank you! I think this is the first time I've logged in for 10 years.

I don't mind the current UI change, but I wish significant changes would come with a toggle button to let me look at the old and new renderings. I don't think it's possible to mentally "place" the improvements without side-by-side comparisons and affordances for finding edge cases where the new UI may be lacking.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#202

Post by l- »

scrollaway wrote: post #197
l- wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> text that is too wide causes people to read less comfortably and retain less information. This seems like an excuse to force JS to enable ads & what should be the default that is toggled with the fullscreen button in the bottom right. It does not justify wasted width as the user can more easily set the text to the appropriate zoom than applying some custom CSS: .mw-page-container { max-width: none !important; } .mw…

You're seriously expecting Wikipedia users to set up custom css to apply their reading preferences, just so that you personally don't have to deal with a different amount of padding? Do you realize the level of entitlement and absurdity here?

One of the two options has to be chosen for the no JS, no query param / no login default - there is no entitlement and absurdity in that expectation. Using the max-width: none or similar as the default option has the benefit of allowing the user's browser keep the ability to monotonely scale the text density along with size using zoom as the displayed area would be nearly constant. It's rather arrogant & condescending to choose for a user a width that overrides what control they have with their window's dimensions, screen size, viewing distance & vision capability.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#203

Post by hidelooktropic »

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.

These kinds of objections are predicated on the idea that white space is inherently wasteful.

But the real question is, why is it good to strain the eyes darting them across distances that large. What is gained by filling in the white space just to fill it?

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#204

Post by veqq »

65 wrote: post #170

If you hate it, it's probably because it's different . You'll get used to it. It's similar to how every time a company re-designs their logo, there's always a huge backlash solely because it's change, and people do not like change. It's a really nice improvement from the previous design.

It's been in use for ages in other languages which I read a lot. It isn't "different". It is concretely worse to me and many others here.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#205

Post by spartanatreyu »

autoexec wrote: post #146
spartanatreyu wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not always, but it often is. Zoomed to 200% the new design is fine though. Content fills the entire screen and the floating table of contents disappears. Works for me at least.

That suggests to me that you're either not sitting the correct distance away from your display, and/or your display's DPI settings are wrong.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#206

Post by mch82 »

lmm wrote: post #195
ashton314 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you really want full-width text, you could write a little custom CSS to make it work how you want it. As it stands, I think the new design is a much better default for most people. Also, zooming and changing browser window size is, while only a keystroke away, isn’t something I want to do just to make a site that should be optimized for reading text more legible. It should just default to that way. In shor…

> I think if you really want full-width text, you could write a little custom CSS to make it work how you want it. How? Seriously, if you have a way to do this that works for pages in general I'll be extremely grateful. I tried using a user stylesheet that said * { max-width: 100% !important } for a while, but that breaks too many non-root elements on all sorts of sites. Whereas making the page narrow when it doesn't…

If you create an account on Wikipedia then you can go into preferences and define custom CSS styles.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#207

Post by ssnistfajen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #156
ssnistfajen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of Wikipedia articles have become well-cited but that façade begins to break down as we dive into more niche topics. Editor wars are real and impossible to resolve most of the time due to how obsessive the involved parties are. Some of them are rather damaging to what narrative is being shaped on some of these articles. The power to control edit access rests in a small group of administrators/moderators who are…

> Lots of Wikipedia articles have become well-cited but that façade begins to break down as we dive into more niche topics. A lot of the time they're just making the citation up. Wikipedia's page on French toast says this: > The earliest known reference to French toast is in the Apicius, a collection of Latin recipes dating to the 1st century CE, where it is described as simply aliter dulcia 'another sweet dish.'[8]…

Great examples and I absolutely agree. The problem here is the lack of visibility/attention due to these topics being extremely niche and largely inconsequential to the real world, yet a matter of principle for a site that tries to present its contents as factual knowledge. Sometimes it takes just one extremely dedicated user to completely lock down any changes on a particular topic and I've experienced this too.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#208

Post by paganel »

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…

Yeah, I hate it, it introduced lots of white space (I'd say about 20-25% of the screen) on the right-hand side. I don't see how this new version [1] is better than this old version [2]

[1] https://imgur.com/a/IZHxqOy

[2] https://imgur.com/a/q1PD3WY

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#209

Post by ilyt »

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')`

Also for some reason they made links even brighter blue

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#210

Post by ilyt »

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.

For 16:9 screen sure, old wikipedia is too wide but I use side tabs in browser so my browsing area is closer to classical 4:3 monitor and the old one fit very well (for me) on that.
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