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…
Wow, I had no idea that Wikia ran on MediaWiki. I have usually avoided wikia wikis because they always seemed harder to use than Wikipedia. Now that I look closer, I can see the similarities. What is the Wikia fractal?
Wikipedia Redefined
141–150 of 305 posts
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#142I 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…
Heh, that's very funny coming from a Wikia employee. "Conservative" is the last word I'd ever use when describing Wikia's changes to the MediaWiki UI. You guys have no problem forking MediaWiki and making drastic changes to the codebase ( http://svn.wikia-code.com/wikia/trunk/ ), so why can't the MediaWiki project make drastic changes of their own?
Wikia's code is indeed a fork of MediaWiki's. We're working on making it a less drastic fork. And we've always tried to make concessions with respect to the UI. For instance users can choose the Monobook skin in the preferences pane.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#143I would really love to be able to highlight and bookmark snippets. Unfortunately, it would likely be a huge back end change for Wikipedia and their servers would likely melt.
It would be great if there was an external site that used content from Wikipedia and had these features.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm more worried about their database servers melting, since the overwhelming amount of traffic Wikipedia handles today is passive consumption. 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.
Has anything that has built on top of wikipedia as the primary product got much traction? I think it is something that would be hard to really get widespread without it.
Can a 3rd party even maintain a fully up to date set of wikipedia content? Not sure what their policy on scraping is?
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#145In the redesign, the body of the pyramid article starts halfway down the page. In the original, it starts 1/4 way down the page.
This is not an improvement.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
J don't understand why you have such a problem with it. Jt seems fine to me.
J don't get it either. Jf you're going to criticize something, make it something substantial.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#147You'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…
The capital "J" was pretty bad too, dropping under the baseline, for no other reason than to differentiate it from that stupid "I"
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#148Design starts with constraints. If you don't understand the constraints, a redesign is just a fantasy.
Wikipedia is heavily constrained by one thing: the existing mediawiki markup. That presents a huge challenge to implementing this redesign.
Large mediawiki installs become brittle because users have a natural tendency to use the markup for presentation, not structure. Combined with the in markup template mechanisms, the tendency is toward a tangle of interdependent markup. Wikipedia's community does far better than most in fighting this with policy and consistency, but it's still an issue.
Implementing this redesign would require not just working with some of the more difficult parts of the mediawiki code base, but also a laborious effort to rewrite a sizable fraction (if not the majority) of all wiki foundation content. That just isn't going to happen.
But that doesn't mean design improvements on wikipedia are impossible, just that any attempt needs to work in alignment with the constraining forces.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#149Agghhh, it's like they're making it web-3.0-y with all the giant logos/buttons and a massive toolbar. I already hate sites enough that cram a whole load of fat things above the actual content. Especially sharing buttons. I KNOW HOW TO COPY A URL DAMMIT!
Just accept the future man.
"Pyramid
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A pyramid (from Greek: πυραμίς pyramis[1]) is a structure whose shape is roughly that of a pyramid in the geometric sense; that is, its outer surfaces are triangular and converge to a single point at the top.
Share "Pyramid" with your friends: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Google+ - Email - Pinterest - Tumblr - Reddit - Delicious - Digg - WordPress
Follow Wikipedia on: Twitter - Facebook - Google+ - Pinterest"
(Or you could get Ghostery)
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#150It's hard to say what's going on with the font. Works fine on Mac 10.8 Chrome 22.0.1215.0 (http://i.imgur.com/QMfte.png), but not in Safari, Firefox or Chrome iOS (http://i.imgur.com/8FruE.png).
