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Wikipedia is getting a new look

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391–400 of 529 posts

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

try changing your IP address, OS language/region and browser language to English

I'm not aware IP addresses have language settings associated with them? since when is this the case? any links for further information?

For a bunch of different reasons, many sites will try to guess where you are located based on your IP address. One misguided thing some sites do is select language based on that lookup.

Although it wouldn't surprise me if some countries try to legislate about that and everyone with an international presence has to do it.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#393
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSA: old.reddit.com is so much better in these regards. I use it on my phone too, with some custom css to make things bigger. There is also i.reddit.com.

I'm writing a custom skin (CSS) to turn New Reddit into Old Reddit for when they inevitably, sadly, turn off old.reddit.com

Have any work in progress examples?

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#394
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linguee is not a reference either for English to French, simply because most of the side-by-side translations it uses are bad translations; and also because it mixes French and Canadian sources, which are sometimes completely unrelated to the point that a native French won't understand a Canadian translation and vice-versa. Deepl, from the same company, is much better and is currently the best online translator.

France French and Canadian French are not that different and are certainly mutually intelligible, kind of like US English and Australian English. (Except of course if you're a rude Parisian and act like any accent except yours is undecipherable).

You can certainly understand them if you're talking with a Canadian, because you can always ask for clarifications. But my point is not about accent, it's about taking a Canadian translation on an online translation service and mistakenly using it in a French document if you're not a French speaker. Good luck having your French readers understand what's a balado (podcast), a Bazou (a car) or a Boucane (the smoke), and that's just a handful of the B words. It doesn't matter whether you are a rude Parisian or not (what's with the stereotyping?)

Or tell them on your gardening website to fill a chaudière to water their garden.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would you solve this given the limited space? A label saying languages is the mosy obvious but real estate is a little limited. Try looking at a wikipedia page on your phone. You could replace the 文A button with one that said "antidisestablishmentarianism" and there would still be plenty of space. It's floating at the left of an empty row.

I agree it totally could be improved. Perhaps they're being careful? Elsewhere in the comments, someone showed that logged in users have more items in that bar ( https://imgur.com/llv2rtc ). That might not work so well in portrait.

I have 5 items in that bar on my Samsung Galaxy and I have no space for a label. As the screenshot shows the labels are there, just not visible until a certain breakpoint

I agree that the UX could be improved and there is plenty of evidence to support that. On the other hand the edit icon is super discoverable and used without the label so I think the challenge with the language icon is 1) there are not many multilingual sites and 2) the other icons there potentially cause the user to ignore them entirely.

Throw in the 200+ languages and longer labels in some of them and it becomes even more complicated...

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#396
post #257

Please, since someone from wikipedia is probably reading this: Keep the JavaScript to a minimum. The plans aren't clear to me, but given what sites like reddit/etc have done during their "updates" the new UI's are terrible on anything that isn't a top of the line device with a screaming fast internet connection. Wikipedia (and a few other "older" sites) is such a pleasure to use as is, don't ruin it. AKA round-trippi…

PSA: old.reddit.com is so much better in these regards. I use it on my phone too, with some custom css to make things bigger. There is also i.reddit.com.

And the only way I can use Facebook - mbasic.facebook.com

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only use old.reddit.com on phone and pc as it is much faster and much more intuitive , reddit has gone to hell in my opinion

I'm already resigned to the fact that once old.reddit.com goes away I'm not going to be spending any more time on Reddit. Maybe that'll be a good thing.

"reddit is fun" on Android is a great app for it. Staying away from reddit more is good for you, too.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#398

So does anyone have a userscript to override the maximum line width? I have claustrophobia, and having text forced into narrow columns actively triggers it. Taking a look at the Basque Wikipedia, I can tell right here that it's completely unusable for me. I'm willing to pay real money for someone to write me a script to override it.

All books ever made have text that has roughly the same text width for a reason. It's a well established pattern, and full width websites ignore the most fundamental design principle. Do books make you feel claustrophobic too?

Your sass is unwelcome. Books are a different, more constrained format.

If I had a book with 12" wide pages and only 6" centered were used for content, it would be uncomfortable.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#399
post #56
post #19

If someone asked me to critique the UX of Wikipedia, the first two things I’d point out would be that I almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does) and that when paragraphs are that wide they become harder to read (especially when they snake around floated images). Not changing for 10 years, watching as some trends fade and others become law-of-the-land, and then making two changes…

I agree very much in principle. The wikipedia desktop site is beautiful, functional, fast, and doesn't change every 6 months to chase trends (unlike every god-damn website today it seems). That being said I don't understand why the sidebar should be collapsible (and collapsed by default). It's just an extra click to access functionality with some people rely on (languages, for example, being probably one of the most…

Same here, I hate it. Here's a userscript that expands the language sidebar: https://github.com/ayyrx/userscripts/raw/master/wpfix/wpfix....

Edit `const enableLanguageSidebarAltView = true` to `const enableLanguageSidebarAltView = false` to make it look exactly like it used to do before that dumb button was implemented

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#400
The one thing I hope is fixed is that for mobile browser, when I'm clocking a link in a wiki article to another link, and then I want to hit the back button to go to the article I was originally reading, the back button doesn't scroll to where I was on the page and I have to scroll down to resume where I was reading.
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