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Explore Wikipedia's New Look

wikimediafoundation.org

271–280 of 288 posts

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#271
Love the new ToC links on the left.

The new look seems to mess up some inline images.

In the following links, the histogram chart under section Historic Population has an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar for the chart image.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bern (New vector-2022 look)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bern?useskin=vector (Previous vector look)

Note: I am viewing this on my surface tablet in landscape mode.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a common accessibility requirement. For example, WCAG suggests limiting the max width of blocks of text to ~80 characters (40 for CJK). https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/#visual-presentation

Aha, I was aware of the 80-character line limit for source code files, but wasn't aware it was a general accessibility recommendation. Thanks for the link!

Sure thing! I only know about it because I've worked on more AX bug reports related to text layout than I care to admit...

I think the 80 characters-per-line for code was a holdover from when IBM punch cards had 80 CPL, but I could be wrong there. I know American typewriters had about 80 CPL, so from a typography perspective maybe that's why 80 is the accessibility sweet-spot? If it's the ballpark equivalent to what we'd see on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper?

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would I fix the errors? I know Wikipedia is lying to me. I can delete the information, which is pretty likely to get reverted. But I can't replace it with correct information; I have no idea when the idea of bread fried in eggs is first documented, and I have no idea whether or not the stock character of Chen Shimei is based on a historical person. For all I know Wikipedia is lying about the publication date of t…

You can add a "not in citation" or "dubious" tag to the reference that's there, or another cleanup tag: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_index/Clean... . A lot of Wikipedia articles are waiting for someone with the right references to come along (or for the right reference to come into existence), and until then the best anyone can do is insert warnings that the article is poorly cited.

I added {{failed verification}} to the French toast article. That was immediately reverted. What's the process for correcting Wikipedia again?

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#274
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whatever reason, especially with a bigger screen, I find that wider text becomes uncomfortable and somewhat exhausting to read. I'm not sure what the right portions/ratio are, but with a 27in screen it's definitely noticeable.

This has been studied a lot in design. Most people prefer line lengths in the 50-60 character region. Some studies show lengths up to 75 to be appropriate, but that’s about the limit. Past that people have a hard time keeping track of where they are and find reading to take more effort.

Office documents seem to default to somewhere in the region of 90 – 100 characters, interestingly.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#276
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')`

it does not only break your bookmarklet, but even vimium [1] is unable to focus the language selection. this is awful.

[1] https://github.com/gdh1995/vimium-c

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#277
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> mostly because scrolling is fundamentally incompatible with columns How so? You just scroll horizontally rather than vertically. Even actual scrolls come in both vertical and horizontal (column-based) formats.

Mouse wheels. That‘s the issue. They mostly scroll only vertically. Horizontal scrolling frequently is a massive pain for everyone involved.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#278
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the Stylus extension for Chrome (also available on Firefox) to write user styles for sites, mostly to improve the legibility of text, but for sites like HN and Reddit that I browse a lot I've customised their look and feel extensively to match my tastes. Creating a custom style for a site just requires you to click the Stylus button in the toolbar, click on the site name at the bottom of the menu to create a ne…

> I use the Stylus extension for Chrome (also available on Firefox) to write user styles for sites, mostly to improve the legibility of text, but for sites like HN and Reddit that I browse a lot I've customised their look and feel extensively to match my tastes. Creating a custom style for a site just requires you to click the Stylus button in the toolbar, click on the site name at the bottom of the menu to create a…

I use the dev tools to find the containing element with max-width by using inspect, clicking on the text and then finding which ancestor has the width, and then it's something like

    div.article-text {
      max-width: unset !important;
      width: 100% !important;
    }
which works in most cases. It's totally a pain to have to do on a new site, but once it's done then you never have to do it again - at least until the website does a redesign lol.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#279
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can even turn off responsive design in the settings. I should have checked earlier.

Do you have to log in?

It seems you do need to log in, but just unchecking 'responsive' makes everything load a lot faster and become a lot more usable.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I find shorter lines difficult to read, they require so much more eye movement than longer lines. When a site will let me I prefer the whole length of my monitor as the line length. In my experience I can read on my monitor for 12+ hours a day without eye strain.
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