Minimal Wikipedia redesign concept

This would work well as a userstyle for Wikipedia if it were available. The type is far too large though, I needed to zoom out about 50% for comfort.

Compare a featured article seen on the front page in the mobile version of Wikipedia [1], with this site's style [2]. The mobile version keeps the text smaller and narrower, making for easier desktop reading. There ultimately isn't much this new style improves upon though.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Joy

[2] http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Cyclone_Joy

IDK, I think people tend to ignore the virtues of Wikipedia's design. It's actually really well thought out. It may not be pretty, or hip, but as far as utility goes it's hard to find a site that can beat it.

Think about how people use Wikipedia: scanning for one specific bit of information. Normal users see 90% of the information on the page as un-useful, why should meta info matter.

Overall, I think their biggest virtue is consistency, even though it's changed over the years, a user generally knows where to find what she's looking for. That's the purpose of good design, is it not?

So clean

No, not another follower of "things are difficult, let's make them simple, modern and nice" camp. Will people learn that removing stuff from the product doesn't make it simple, but simplistic? Removing features (changing languages, wikimedia/wikiquote links) is not an improvement.

Sure, the font typeface is nice, and much better than original but that's about it.

Why is the text so damn huge? I know how to use zoom, thank you very much. Actually, you even broke that - take a look at timeline image of http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Hanibal - the picture text is a tiny compared to the gigantic text - I can zoom in, but then the text becomes even bigger.

A lot of whitespace and removing virtually all the colors makes the page look very sterile. Remove scrollbar, make the links indistinguishable from text and you have a Metro/Modern(R)(TM) app. I still wonder how much brain damage the designer of that style suffers from...

No visited link indication? Is that meant to be some kind of a joke?

Obviously in some designers' minds (including yours) cleaner = better. But it's not! Wikipedia is not the award-winning oh-my-god-it-looks-so-nice page. No it's very very functional and easy to read. All those vertical lines, boxes and bars add structure and visual cues to the text and make it much easier to read. Thank you for taking it away.

No offense, but this creation is horrible.

Looks much better, and the wiki editor is great too to make quick changes on mobile.