Explore Wikipedia's New Look • Hacker News Board

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#211

Post by paganel » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 7:31 AM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #150

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.

I guess it depends on the person. I'm happy to accept that I'm strange, but I'd much rather read lines that mostly fill my screen with normal margins on each side than short lines in a long narrow column surrounded by an ocean of empty whitespace. I can't be the only one who feels this way. I have yet to buy a book where 90% of each page is blank and there's just a tiny column of words down the middle of the page.

You're not the only one. I was also comparing this new design with what you get in books, I'd hate to have lots of blank space in a book (no matter the width of said book).

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#212

Post by 130e13a » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 7:33 AM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #191

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #149

Not that it matters to most people, but I'm surprised this didn't break the Dictionary app on my 10-year-old version of OS X (10.9 Mavericks). Wikipedia inside the Dictionary app looks basically identical to how it did a week ago, even though aiui it's basically just rendering the Wikipedia page (in a now terribly outdated browser engine) with some custom CSS. I wonder why it's still working.

Oops, I'm an idiot, the new theme isn't the default yet!

just tested this, and it seems to be the default (at least when i navigate to the english-language wikipedia in a new incognito browser tab).

Dictionary app still seems to be working fine, though.

my guess here would be that they probably don't access the HTML at all, but instead go through MediaWiki's API.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#213

Post by gregvab » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 7:36 AM UTC

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.)

Apparently I only gave it a quick glance because I thought it was Arabic

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#214

Post by pwdisswordfisha » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 7:40 AM UTC

ddejohn wrote: post #188

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.

I've been using Redirector for the last few years to redirect Wikipedia links to the mobile site because the interface is so much cleaner and the content so much easier to read. I'm super excited about this change because I can finally get rid of that browser extension.

I have been using a user script to do just the opposite, because the interface is so much poorly delineated and the content much harder to read.

I guess I'll be modifying it to plaster ?useskin=vector at the end of every link as well...

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#215

Post by arrrg » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 7:44 AM UTC

paganel wrote: post #208

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

The reason for this is readability. Long lines of text are empirically bad for readability, making it hard for readers to find the correct next line.

However, the line length Wikipedia picked seems to be a bad compromise. At around 120 characters per line it‘s double the recommend line length (60 characters).

If you look at newspapers, magazines and books you will see the 60 character rule of thumb adhered to pretty exactly and thoroughly. It‘s just a typographical best practice.

On the web and on wider maximized screens the issue is always the white space. Newspapers solve this issue with columns. However, that‘s not a realistic solution on the web (not so much for technical reasons, mostly because scrolling is fundamentally incompatible with columns).

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#216

Post by mozball » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 7:48 AM UTC

  So                Much     White    Space
  Its               also   off-center which
  is                annoying on an 15"laptop

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#217

Post by hotpockets » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 7:48 AM UTC

something is definitely wrong with firefox on linux. There is no margin on the left side.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#218

Post by notpushkin » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 8:23 AM UTC

Dalewyn wrote: post #189

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…

>I really hope any website could be as flexible as Wikipedia to allow users to write their own CSS. Once upon a time, there was an initiative for websites to add a unique CSS ID to the tag so users could customize them with user stylesheets. For example: for this website, and then users can apply CSS rules as they see fit via the user stylesheet. Sadly, the initiative never took off and most browsers nowadays don't e…

Boy do I have good news [1] for you.

[1]: https://github.com/openstyles/stylus

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#219

Post by stockerta » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 8:40 AM UTC

Thanks I hate it.

I hate that sides want to control how "wide", I mean narrow the text can be. Sorry, I prefer longer lines and not a bunch of empty space on the sides.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#220

Post by zppln » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 8:45 AM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #131

ghghgfdfgh wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

This assumes you control your browser, which may not be the case in a corp setting.