Minimal Wikipedia redesign concept

> … custom formatting on some wikipedia pages might not look right. If you see anything like that, let me know.

The formatting of highlighted code examples is not right. Sometimes there is extra indentation at the beginning, and the syntax highlighting is always missing. For example, compare [your Ruby (programming language) – examples](http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Ruby_%28programming_language%2...) to [Wikipedia’s Ruby (programming language) – examples](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_%28programming_language%29...). Also, the code example `puts"Give me a number"` is missing a space compared to Wikipedia’s version.

There is too big a difference between the font sizes of normal text and of code blocks. In the site, code blocks are at a readable font size while main text is overly big, and when I zoom out to 80% to make the main text more comfortable, code block text is now too small. Picture captions and infoboxes also have this problem, to a lesser extent.

On [the about page](http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/?about), “email me” should be a link to “mailto:moe.salih@gmail.com”, so we don’t have to go to your personal website and find the link in the footer.

It works for me, in my context, on my screen, it should be fine, right? Well, that's not designing. That's cheating. You're skewing the content's use, perverting its value.

This point is worth repeating: design without a purpose is not design; it's onanism. Anyone can go spend a weekend playing with photoshop for hours to give free rein to their own "vision" and aesthetic prejudices, given enough familiarity with the tool --in a way, not too different from shopping or 'pimping' a car or what not. But an altogether different challenge is to design for users, the vast majority of whom one will likely never even meet. And that requires at the very least some empathy for the poor victims stuck with one's shitty and arbitrary design choices long after one has moved on check in hand --like disabling zoom, hello!?!??.

So when the OP glibly says in their manifesto[1]:

"I love Wikipedia. It's awesome. But it deserves a better and more delightful design. This is my vision of how the reading experience should be like. Better typography, removed side bar, reduced clutter, improved contrast and clarity, and more open space."

I would respond:

1. Ok, but try first put yourself in the shoes the hundreds of millions of users who rely on wikipedia every day and their whole spectrum of use cases, environments and needs; then

2. try locate the totality of your own experience within that spectrum; and then

3. ask yourself to what extent your prior notions of delight, clarity, typographic beauty, etc might be highly conditioned by the peculiarities of your own experience and environment; and

4. to what extent such acquired "good design" intuitions are really the kind of self-evident, plausibly generalizable ground truths about usability and human interaction you feel it's worth pontificating about.

[1] http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/?about

I fear that your design kind of strips away a whole ton of functionality and with something like Wikipedia functionality is infinitely more important than design.

Kudos on actually coding up a completely working live preview though. That's not something I see too often with these kinds of proposals.