121–130 of 305 posts
I would love some a image browser and lightbox style reference pop-ups. BUT I imagine the current build runs great on old machines, making it accessible to a wide audience.
The front page of Wikipedia works remarkably well for discovery - go to en.wikipedia.org on any given day, and you are guaranteed to learn something new. Deciding that users want to see your overbearing minimalism and your 'sound-great-in-concept-meetings-but-shit-on-paper' designs instead of you know, actual information on the front page of an encyclopaedia strikes me as an astonishing act of hubris. The one piece o…
You are comparing en.wikipedia.org with their redesign of www.wikipedia.org. Notice that the latter is, with respect to content, the same as their redesign: languages, search, and sister sites.
Secondly, in the screenshot you are looking at, the content of the article has obviously pushed down due to the activation of the “quote” mode. Honestly, I doubt you do not realize this and I can’t help but wonder what motivation you have to criticize their work so unfairly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it a good idea for a design shop to propose features that would beg huge numbers of otherwise passive consumers of the encyclopedia to register accounts? Because you'd have to do that, to get highlighting and bookmarking.
I don't know. You think it's a bad idea though? Why? Are we worried about vandalism? I think I can support an idea that would hope to turn otherwise passive consumers into not-so-much-any-longer passive consumers. As long as pseudonyms remain acceptable.
If you think highlighting and bookmarking of Wikipedia articles is extremely valuable --- and maybe it is! --- go start a site backed by Wikipedia's content. In the places where it actually counts, Wikipedia has bent over backwards to be helpful to developers.
copying my comment from reddit: If a user doesn't recognise the word "English" then they are not going to have any idea what language select. The reason the languages are all listed on the page without any interaction needed is so someone can look at the webpage and recognise their language and select it without having to understand anything else. How do I access the main page of a wiki? This isn't redefined, it's ju…
Not to mention the front page colour bar for languages with labels appearing after rolling over has some pretty serious discoverability and accessibility issues.
Sent this email to them: " Absolutely terrible; increasing the signal/noise ratio, in addition to increasing unnecessary white space were extremely bad design choices. The purpose of Wikipedia is to share information. The changes that you proposed impede that goal by the addition of a step where the user has to "understand" the design, before they can begin to use it. You should have reviewed mathematical and scienti…
Why mail it to them? We who hang out at HN may find it awful, but it's mean to smear it in their faces.
You'd probably want any redesign of Wikipedia to start with the understanding that the front page of the English Wikipedia isn't WWW.WIKIPEDIA.ORG, it's EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG, and that that page is dominated by content --- most notably the WP Featured Articles, which are a core part of the Wikipedia community. Draw the pretty colored lines after you grok the concept. It goes downhill for me as they try to get more technic…
> It does not have, as its primary goal, the delight of random web users. But it could. And that's really the point of this exercise: showing one way that it could additionally delight users, on top of providing the critical functionality it already does. Delighting users is one step up[1] from what Wikipedia does right now. Yes, they're doing something of fundamental importance to the human race. But does that mean…
Advertising campaigns-in-disguise do not.
You'd probably want any redesign of Wikipedia to start with the understanding that the front page of the English Wikipedia isn't WWW.WIKIPEDIA.ORG, it's EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG, and that that page is dominated by content --- most notably the WP Featured Articles, which are a core part of the Wikipedia community. Draw the pretty colored lines after you grok the concept. It goes downhill for me as they try to get more technic…
> Also the capital "I" in the font they're using is killing me. This is the main thing I remember after reading what seemed like an otherwise interesting study.
"We check our mail dozen times a day."
No. We check our mail a dozen times a day.
I work at Wikia, which means I work with MediaWiki every day. I was kind of offended by how naive New is New is being. I don't think they have any grasp on the sort of massive scope changes like this would require. Wikipedia is not MediaWiki's only consumer. A lot of communities that use MediaWiki are extremely conservative about the UI, so some of the conservatism is by design. The WikiMedia Foundation is working on…
I don't think they're proposing changes to Mediawiki, they're proposing changes to the look of Wikipedia. While they may be synonomous, one is the software, one is the organization that uses the software. Wikipedia could change the template for their version of the site, without affecting MW at all.