Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Explore Wikipedia's New Look

wikimediafoundation.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 288 posts

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#251

Post by rascul »

542458 wrote: post #163
Night_Thastus wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whatever reason, especially with a bigger screen, I find that wider text becomes uncomfortable and somewhat exhausting to read. I'm not sure what the right portions/ratio are, but with a 27in screen it's definitely noticeable.

This has been studied a lot in design. Most people prefer line lengths in the 50-60 character region. Some studies show lengths up to 75 to be appropriate, but that’s about the limit. Past that people have a hard time keeping track of where they are and find reading to take more effort.

That's way too short for me. Somewhere between 120 to 150 seems a good minimum, 200 or maybe up to 250 are much better maximums, maybe even a bit higher. I lose my place easily when I have to change lines so damn much.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#252

Post by hbn »

rascul wrote: post #251
542458 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been studied a lot in design. Most people prefer line lengths in the 50-60 character region. Some studies show lengths up to 75 to be appropriate, but that’s about the limit. Past that people have a hard time keeping track of where they are and find reading to take more effort.

That's way too short for me. Somewhere between 120 to 150 seems a good minimum, 200 or maybe up to 250 are much better maximums, maybe even a bit higher. I lose my place easily when I have to change lines so damn much.

So you have trouble reading books?

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#253

Post by coldpie »

Dalewyn wrote: post #189
chazeon wrote: post #9

Have been using this new theme since beta. I love the much cleaner look more than the previous one. One can always tune the CSS yourself at the user's preference near the theme selector. The only thing I need to adjust to my liking is to limit the line width: main#content { max-width: 40em; } For those who hate it: you will always have the option to switch back to the old theme. I really hope any website could be as…

>I really hope any website could be as flexible as Wikipedia to allow users to write their own CSS. Once upon a time, there was an initiative for websites to add a unique CSS ID to the tag so users could customize them with user stylesheets. For example: for this website, and then users can apply CSS rules as they see fit via the user stylesheet. Sadly, the initiative never took off and most browsers nowadays don't e…

Firefox does. You have to go enable it in about:config, but it still works fine. Even has per-domain filters so you don't even need the body-id attribute you mentioned. See top example in the README here: https://github.com/NapoleonWils0n/firefox-css

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#254

Post by rascul »

hbn wrote: post #252
rascul wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's way too short for me. Somewhere between 120 to 150 seems a good minimum, 200 or maybe up to 250 are much better maximums, maybe even a bit higher. I lose my place easily when I have to change lines so damn much.

So you have trouble reading books?

I used to have trouble with some books. Now I read them on a screen with longer lines.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#255

Post by dotnet00 »

bearmode wrote: post #240
dotnet00 wrote: post #159

Ewww what's with this terrible trend of wasting the majority of the screen space on a 16:9 monitor like this. Let it fit the window width, if someone needs it to be narrow let it adjust itself appropriately.

White space isn't wasted space. It makes the page infinitely more readable to limit line lengths. Yes, you could have reduced your window width before. No, you shouldn't have to do that to get a comfortable reading experience.

Making more than half the screen white space is wasted space. The point of resizable windows is to be able to adjust the content as desired, so it's pretty ridiculous to argue that everyone else should suffer wasted space because long lines are scary.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#256

Post by rising-sky »

goldbattle wrote: post #179
rising-sky wrote: post #174

> Research has shown that limiting the width of longform text leads to a more comfortable reading experience, and better retention of the content itself Surprised they did not include a citation for this research...

It seems they link to a discussion page [1], which references this document (I can't find a published version): Computer text line lengths affect reading and learning Peter Orton https://cdn.tc-library.org/Edlab/eye-tracking%20article.pdf But it seems that Peter Orton has published quite a few works in this area [2], [3]. Specifically [3] seems to note that with a less wide text column width readers are not statistic…

Appreciated, thanks. Just expected footnote marks in the article similar to Wikipedia or hyperlinks

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#257

Post by jdlrobson »

trynewideas wrote: post #144
jdlrobson wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there, developer here and I can confirm that we are still actively maintaining those skins and preserving them. We have around 101 skins that work with MediaWiki and 7 skins deployed in production. You might be interested in the sections "WE MADE IMPROVEMENTS TO BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY" and "WE IMPROVED THIRD-PARTY SUPPORT" on https://jdlrobson.com/posts/2023-01-17_the-new-wikipedia-app... which have a few more li…

Hey! What happened with the AFBTL a11y feedback on focus-order issues, like closing or hiding the language menu throwing focus back to the top of the page, or the ToC menu problems? Those seemed like a11y dealbreakers, but they made it through to GA.

Hey there. As I mention in my blog post, there are still remaining issues that we are aware of and will fix. We got some consultancy on the remaining accessibility issues, and they were graded with priorities. We took care of all the ones that were flagged as blockers, and are working through the rest of the list over the next three months. You can track progress if you are interested in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T318373.

Some of these are made a little more complicated as they involve different teams - for example the language button is owned by a team who works on a Asia/Europe timezone (compared to our US/Europe timezone).

I think you are specifically referring to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T325009 (still awaiting discussion) and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T318013 (resolved next week) ?

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#258

Post by trynewideas »

yamtaddle wrote: post #25
ketzu wrote: post #23

I really like it. Mostly the repurposing of the left side for the table of contents, but also the width reduction. I only use half of my screen for my browser already, and on many pages, lines are just insanely long. Personally, I nevery really minded having open space on websites. I never felt it made reading worse. Contrary, pages with little whitespace felt cramped and I lost my position now and then. But I unders…

I wish they'd let the old sidebar display as a third column if the viewport's wide enough. However, this: > I'd stil like the language selector below the table of contents in the sidebar. would also cover most of the reason I wish they'd do that. [EDIT] Incidentally, what ever happened to 3-column layouts? They could keep the site menu on the left and stick the TOC on the right (keeping it visible all the time is def…

> They could keep the site menu on the left and stick the TOC on the right (keeping it visible all the time is definitely an improvement, and the thing I like most about this redesign).

Interestingly, the work toward implementing this new version of Vector allows any skin to decouple the TOC from the page content in MW 1.38+. It wasn't possible to move the page-generated ToC out of the content body before without resorting to JS/CSS hacks or implementing a parallel ToC generator in the skin or as an extension.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:How_to_make_a_MediaWik...

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#259

Post by trynewideas »

ghghgfdfgh wrote: post #113
chazeon wrote: post #9

Have been using this new theme since beta. I love the much cleaner look more than the previous one. One can always tune the CSS yourself at the user's preference near the theme selector. The only thing I need to adjust to my liking is to limit the line width: main#content { max-width: 40em; } For those who hate it: you will always have the option to switch back to the old theme. I really hope any website could be as…

> you will always have the option to switch back to the old theme. The only issue is, you need to log in to do this. I don't want to have to log in to a website that I read, and never edit, to get rid of the giant distracting table of contents.

Also, VPN users who create or log in to accounts are radically limited or indiscriminately blocked.[1][2] Getting out of that state requires manual intervention.[3] Many VPN users don't use accounts as a result.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_edits_are_not_ano...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:I_have_been_blocked

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_block_exemption

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#260

Post by trynewideas »

ashton314 wrote: post #141
nsajko wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text width is important, but this is not a solution, zooming and changing browser window geometry is.

I think if you really want full-width text, you could write a little custom CSS to make it work how you want it. As it stands, I think the new design is a much better default for most people. Also, zooming and changing browser window size is, while only a keystroke away, isn’t something I want to do just to make a site that should be optimized for reading text more legible. It should just default to that way. In shor…

Not all uses of Wikipedia are the types of reading supported by works and research in long-form reading. Hell, many, many Wikipedia articles aren't long-form, and paragraph text is a minority of content on some table-heavy articles.

The issue isn't with width but a lack of user preferences, logged in and not. You don't need user accounts, cookies, persistence, or frankly even Javascript to change the content width on an article. The skin designer can set the best practice for a contrived ideal use case as the default, and still let anyone with other use cases expand the content's max-width to fill more space.

EDIT: Looks like they added one — there's now a "Toggle limited content width" button now appearing for me in the bottom-right corner of the wider desktop views.

Post reply on HN