The single W just looks like they want to be Wordpress.
Not my cup of tea.
Wikipedia Redefined
241–250 of 305 posts
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I'm not the designer, but recognize this for what it is - a thought piece that obviously required some fairly significant effort to put together. Some items have issues as you point out, but there are also some very intelligent ideas here and that was the point - to put something out there credible for discussion.
I agree, the majority of commenters have chosen to just rip apart this strong effort at doing something even if it isn't perfect. I've found that a good portion of the wikipedia "community" to be terribly provincial and cliquish. They're like the homeowners associations of the web, they have "their" way of doing it and get almost irritatingly passionate over trivial nonsense (should it be "behavior or behaviour") The…
"If you think Wikipedia is perfect, you're delusional -- no site is perfect."
Who said it is? That's a strawman if I ever saw one.
"So rather than constant critism, put your money where your mouth is and build your own mock up."
No mockup is perfect. This one has some HUGE flaws, and they've all been pointed out. You could have pointed out what is strong about this proposal, or what is wrong with the criticism. Just making up nice excuses for not doing that ain't enough.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
They lost me at "Jmagine" ....
Ugh thanks for pointing that out -- I read the whole article and was assuming 'Jts' was some technology I'd not heard of yet.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I highly highly doubt that this is an actual appeal by them to change the MediaWiki interface. I see this purely as a publicity stunt / marketing move, intended to get their brand and abilities out there in front of people. And to be frank, I think they're being quite successful at that. UX/practicality aside, most of the components do look good. (though good parts of it remind me of Google, Quora, and other prominen…
> most of the components do look good. (though good parts of it remind me of Google, Quora, and other prominent sites) I got the exact same aesthetic feeling, too. This redesign reminded of nothing so much as GMail.
Exactly. No content, just big buttons that aren't clear about what they do.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#245To me, it is obviously just an experiment in design concepts. I enjoyed reading it. I don't agree with almost everything, and the changes to wikipedia they make are, in my opinion, fuck-ugly, but I don't know why we need to be so harsh on it!! It's not like they were trying to replace Wikipedia, just play with 're-imagining any website'.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#246You'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…
> Imagine Google's landing page being chokeful of "content" including, most notably, the featured articles of random nature.
Yahoo's landing page is full of content and is useful for many people. Wikipedia's landing page is also full of content and is organized much better then yahoo's page. The majority of wikipedia's audience will google "SOMETHING" or "SOMETHING wiki" and read it possibly click a few links from the main article. A large minority of Wikipedia users including many who rarely or never edit or contribute want to browse "random" interesting facts possibly going on an info binge clicking dozens of links(leading to a tree of articles).
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#247You'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…
I appreciate why the authors have made the suggestions that they have.
Their reasonably desires do not prevent the end result being a dog's breakfast.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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…
"but it's kinda been done before" 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 alr…
"Been done before" doesn't even begin to cover the amount of spec mockups we see like this. Oh, you whipped up some new design and functionality for us in Photoshop one afternoon? Thank you so much for doing literally 5% of the work of your proposed redesign, please let me know where to send the cheque for giving us a huge amount of work to do that we never asked for.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think if you're going to put so much focus on visuals, and make it your clear aim to get as much attention from the world as possible, it would probably be a good idea to:
* Check that your font doesn't do anything crazy, like make "I" look like "J" - come on, the sixth word on the page looks like it has a spelling mistake
* Check your grammar. I know it's pernickety but if I'm hiring a designer I expect attention to detail, and if someone doesn't get someone to cast a cursory glance over their work before inviting thousands of people to look at it, what does that say about how much effort and pride they put into their work?
* Check your spelling, I saw at least one fairly basic mistake (for rationale see above)
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#250Earlier 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.
Also, there's a grammatical error: "We check our mail dozen times a day." No. We check our mail a dozen times a day.
They're Lithuanian. I'm guessing English is not their first language.
Seeing the number of possessive its with an apostrophe on HN I can cope with someone using English as a second language making a minor grammar error.