211–220 of 305 posts
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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.
A big deal for who? Nobody cares except the 5 people involved.
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> 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…
Google is a search engine designed to be fully functional in its simplicity. Wikipedia is a community. If you use Wikipedia only as a search engine, you are missing out.
I've been a part of the community, did daily edits for about a year, but ultimately there's just too many people who like to argue and enforce things (read - "delete shit left and right") rather than to actually contribute and edit. To each his own, but that community was not something that I would ever miss.
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> 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…
> "Imagine Google's landing page being chokeful of "content" including, most notably, the featured articles of random nature." In the case of Google that is easy, since they have no content. Wikipedia does, and displays it (and yes, content, not "content", I have no idea what you thought you were doing there, but I saw it) -- along with a search field. So where is the problem? > "People come, they consume and they le…
You nailed it. I think that's the thing that really bothered me if not many others too. This is cliche now and if you're going to do it then you'd better make something really god damn good! This comes off like "hey, we can redesign a major website and get a bunch of notoriety, lots of street cred, back links, and look like a big deal in the design world". Major fail. The bar was already set pretty high but now that we've seen it enough times the bar is way higher.
-It's completely impractical and does not take into account some of the most basic ideas that Wikipedia is and depends upon. I don't think it's very well thought out or researched, and serves mostly as a hypothetical portfolio piece for a design firm.
For example, the fact that Wikipedia is available in multiple languages is quite possibly its most important feature. The idea of burying language selection within an incomprehensible color band (that will only work on non-touch devices) boggles my mind.
- Many, many important principles are tossed away. Why do the designers change the meaning of the "history" button? Burying the revision history is counter to all things that wikis stand for.
- Research into the Foundation projects would tell you that storing a user's browsing history is against the privacy policy - so why include that?
- > "Sharing functions will be the same so no change is necessary" - except that there are no sharing functions.
- The most basic principle of product design is "Know the product," and these designers do not.
And finally,
This is to say nothing of the exercise in 'brand manipulation.' The most powerful brand that Wikipedia has is the wordmark itself ("wikipedia"), followed by the distinctive "W" logo (crossed "v" characters), followed by a single puzzle piece, followed by the puzzle globe. The brand rework here throws ALL of these things away and replaces them with a stylized "w" glyph that is almost but not quite exactly like the logo used by Wordpress."
But that's just my opinion"
"If you want to have an idea of what the Wikimedia Foundation is thinking with regards to the future of Wikipedia, you'd be better served by reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20...
[1] Brandon full response to the design: http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Wikipedia-What-does-the-Wikip...
More about this story as it breaks!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A big deal for who? Nobody cares except the 5 people involved.
(to put it in web 2.0 speak: properly incentivizing users to submit quality user-generated content is essential to any crowdsourced website, and few incentives work as well as the recognition of your peers).
For a look at what Wikipedia is actually of thinking of designing over the next 3 years, check out Project Athena: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20...
Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
:)
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…
The existing front-page looks like it should work in browsers with JS disabled (though I have not personally tested this). We should think carefully about the possible consequences of Wikipedia dropping support for no-JS browsers.
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Also, there's a grammatical error: "We check our mail dozen times a day." No. We check our mail a dozen times a day.
Good grief. Is everything you've ever made absolutely perfect? You build something beautiful and then you can dogpile on a grammar mistake.
The reality is that if something isn't written well, the design is not going to wow me by itself. Good writing is a requirement, not an option, for great sites.
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's hilarious from the start - first thing they do is throw out the logo that incorporates multiple languages and says 'fuck you, we're going English for Wiki'. They compound this by then making all the various logos English-derived, so these guys have basically shouted to the world that they don't grasp the basics of their client. They even propose a feature that shows everyone how much English dominates the other…