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Wikipedia Redefined

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Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#131

Post by mdm_ »

kristianc wrote: post #15

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…

Now I've only got ~300 classroom hours of web design at a community college, not an art/design degree which I'm sure these guys and gals do, but having the main thing that the page exists for start 2/3 of the way down the page is baffling to me. Nine times out of ten, users are not coming to your website so that you can masturbate all over them with sexy widgets and edgy font choices. This design tells me the creator(s) either don't know or don't care what people are using the site for.

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#132

Post by shenberg »

fromhet wrote: post #113
patrickmclaren wrote: post #78

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're reading it wrong - it's blunt criticism, but it's also constructive. It's not fun to read this, but I find it a lot better than someone saying your X is awesome while thinking privately that it sucks.

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#133

Post by eps »

tptacek wrote: post #27

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…

> Draw the pretty colored lines after you grok the concept.

There is nothing to grok. Imagine Google's landing page being chokeful of "content" including, most notably, the featured articles of random nature.

Your comment inadvertently demonstrates the problem with Wikipedia as it exists now. A vast majority of its users has nothing to do with its community. People come, they consume and they leave. Sad, but that's life. But still the site is built to favor not their experience, but the experience of those who is deeply involved with Wikipedia - the very same people who are perfectly content with how things are and who resist the change initiated by those outside of the community.

So perhaps instead of dismissing alternative views as complete garbage, it might've been a better idea to try and understand where their authors are coming from and why it is that they are proposing the changes.

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#135

Post by patrickmclaren »

fromhet wrote: post #113
patrickmclaren wrote: post #78

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.

I mailed them based on a number of reasons: 1. Critiquing is an essential step of the design process, 2. They provided an email address at the end of the post, 3. I wanted to ensure that they weren't reinforcing their design biases that had emerged as a result of their 2 month drive to release their concept.

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#136

Post by gddr »

ilaksh wrote: post #86

The biggest problem I have with this sort of thing -- actually probably the whole field(s) of UI/UX design -- is that there is no actual prototype but it seems like they are implying that the programmers didn't include any of those features because they didn't think of them, and that now the real work for the 'redesign' has been done. As if the hard part was making a bunch of pictures. So this whole thing really irri…

I read somewhere about how Windows introduced in early versions the ability to make buttons look "3D" (update: here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/07/28/19958...), and for the next few years every program made its buttons look more 3D than the previous version, until someone decided they had gone too far and started going in the opposite direction. And now looking at Metro I'd say we are at the other extreme (completely flat and minimalist). I hope it stabilizes somewhere in the middle in 5 years. Just look how fast they ditched the "vista" look.

It's funny if you look at http://stocklogos.com/topic/past-and-future-famous-logos. That page is satire from 2011... well check out the last "Microsoft" logo ;-)

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#137

Post by MrMatters »

ArbitraryLimits wrote: post #44
estel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, the overwhelming majority of people who I've observed using Wikipedia go to www.wikipedia.com and then select "English".

Really? I've never in my life went to wikipedia without following a link from a Google search. I don't think I've ever seen the Wikipedia home page.

I go to Wikipedia itself all the time. I just type 'en' + enter into my address bar because I'm so used to it, but I'm sure there's probably millions of people that always go to the first page instead.

I still think it should remain mostly as it is, though. I didn't like their changes to it.

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#138

Post by tptacek »

eps wrote: post #133
tptacek wrote: post #27

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…

> Draw the pretty colored lines after you grok the concept. There is nothing to grok. Imagine Google's landing page being chokeful of "content" including, most notably, the featured articles of random nature. Your comment inadvertently demonstrates the problem with Wikipedia as it exists now. A vast majority of its users has nothing to do with its community. People come, they consume and they leave. Sad, but that's l…

The Wikipedia FA's aren't "random". They're a showcase of the best articles on the site, and are p a i n s t a k i n g l y vetted by the WP community. Getting your article on the front page is a very big deal. The FA process is one of the primary drivers of editorial quality on the site.

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#139

Post by blaines »

pirateking wrote: post #38
tptacek wrote: post #27

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.

I agree, J != I

I'm a fan of the minimalism but as high caliber as I was expecting.

http://www.minimallyminimal.com/ is one of my favorites.

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#140

Post by aristidb »

kristianc wrote: post #15

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…

If by Swiss you mean Swiss-German, there is a wikipedia for that language group (http://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houptsyte), but I'm pretty sure most Swiss-German speakers use the German wikipedia instead. I don't know about the situation for Swiss-French, Swiss-Italian and Romansh speakers.
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