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Wikipedia is getting a new look

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Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#451

Post by TuringTest »

bosswipe wrote: post #197
Eiriksmal wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also find your first point to be a truly indispensable tool. How else do you know what they call carbon fiber in German? [0] But the second is a touchy area. In fact, Wikipedia's co-founder recently wrote a blog post detailing how its neutral point-of-view policy has flopped, in the name of fighting false balance. [1] His examples are pretty embarrassing, but more important in that Google points human "Search Quali…

I don't understand Larry Sanger's complaint about NPOV. If a neutral encyclopedia was required to list all minority points of view on every topic then nothing would be knowable. It wouldn't be able to say that the earth is round. If saying that the earth is round is biased then neutrality is worthless and not worth pursuing.

The original statement of NPOV was to at least mention any significant view supported by a significant minority of experts or people involved; not EVERY topic. It makes sense that, if you want the encyclopedia to be a starting point for investigating a subject, it informs you of the existence of significant non-sanctioned views.

In practice, this need is usually satisfied by the Talk pages and archives. The published article is sanitized, but if you really want to learn about the controversies in the topic, your best choice is to dig deep in the discussions that resulted in the controversy being excised from the visible version. It's quite rare that the talk pages are also purged as well.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#452

Post by Kiro »

Uehreka wrote: 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…

> then making two changes that are backed by a fair amount of data

I don't like how you go from a subjective assumption that no-one uses the sidebar to this, almost sounding disappointed that they haven't already done it. Or are you referring to some other data? I for one use the sidebar all the time.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#453

Post by dang »

jdranczewski wrote: post #446
amirkdv wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does) The left sidebar has two killer features for me: 1. Finding canonical translations for technical terms. You need to know what the standard way to translate "hardware acceleration" or "differentiable manifold" is in French? Go to the wikipedia page and hover over the language switcher link in the left sidebar. Done. This has become one…

I have been reading HN for a while and never commented, but the translation thing is very close to my heart, what with learning Physics both in Polish and English at different stages of my life. So much so that I've made a dedicated tool for this: https://wikitranslator.github.io/ It uses Wikipedia's APIs to "click the language links" for you. It also displays short summaries of both languages' articles, so the trans…

You should make a Show HN out of that! Just wait a while (perhaps a couple weeks) for the hivemind caches to clear.

See the tips at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638, especially the one about adding a comment explaining how you came to work on this and what's different about it.

If you do submit it, email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we might be able to help further. And welcome to the state change of HN-commenting!

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#454

Post by ben_w »

anyfoo wrote: post #411
lhoff wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The literal translation for carbon fiber would be "Kohlefaser" and that is also used quite commonly.

I admit I'm not in any field that deals with materials a lot, but OP said "Kohlefaserverstärkter Kunststoff" (which I likely wrongly called "carbon fiber" in English), is "Kohlefaser" really the same? Maybe it is and I'm just ignorant about that.

My German-as-second-language understanding is:

Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter Kunststoff == Kohlen (literally coal but understood more broadly as any carbon) stoff (material) faser (thread) verstärkter (reinforced) Kunststoff (plastic).

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#455

Post by account42 »

Uehreka wrote: 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…

> The fullscreen expandable thing for images is pretty good

Strongly disagree: Links shared by people with JS enabled now silently show the page instead of the image that was intended to be shared if the recipient has JS disabled.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#456

Post by murrayhenson »

amirkdv wrote: post #135
Uehreka wrote: 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 almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does) The left sidebar has two killer features for me: 1. Finding canonical translations for technical terms. You need to know what the standard way to translate "hardware acceleration" or "differentiable manifold" is in French? Go to the wikipedia page and hover over the language switcher link in the left sidebar. Done. This has become one…

My wife (native Polish speaker) and I (native English speaker) both use Wikipedia's left-hand list of articles in other languages to get quick translations of the title/subject of a given article.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#457

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

"We welcome anyone curious about our changes to try them out and give us feedback"

OK, how? I can't find any link.

Edit: Found some https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme...?

At least put a link to them somewhere obvious.

Main thing is, seems fine without Jscript. Good. That's the main thing.

Print preview is not working right on palemoon. Probably a PM bug. OK, tried printing the entire text of https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionnaire:Page_d%E2%80%99a... but only got the first page.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#458

Post by account42 »

waldofrank wrote: post #233
blewboarwastake wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second using Wikipedia for translating, most of the time is better than using a translator or using a dictionary and sometimes is the only option for more technical or specific terms. I don't use it for comparing between languages much because I'm bilingual and my native tongue Wikipedia is not that big, but sometimes is really interesting to see the different perspectives.

Regarding the comments about the importance of language links in the sidebar: if you look here you can see that the language links will be moved to a button/menu in the article header — https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme... The conclusions of the user testing show that people have a much easier time finding them in the new location.

Will the new menu require JS to access?

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#459

Post by account42 »

Izno wrote: post #316
seppel wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sole critique of the UX of Wikipedia that I have is that the normal version of Wikipedia redirects you to the mobile version when using a mobile device, and changes the URL while doing so. This is why we end up with all these m.wikipedia links. The mobile version, however, does not redirect you to the normal page when using a normal computer. So people like myself constantly have to edit the "m." from wikipedia l…

Firstly, at the bottom of the page in either desktop or mobile you can get to the other with a mobile/desktop link. (Discoverability fail maybe?) Secondly, there's discussion about serving everything from a single domain at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T214998 , which I guess would enable the normal mobile browser feature of switching between desktop and mobile.

> Secondly, there's discussion about serving everything from a single domain at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T214998 , which I guess would enable the normal mobile browser feature of switching between desktop and mobile.

Except there should not be two versions at all and instead they should just make the desktop version responsive and strip out the bloat - I don't want an article to on desktop to load six different javascript files and have a giant banner at the top any more than on mobile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test is 27 different requests for me - that is inexcusable for mostly text content.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#460

Post by pferde »

davidivadavid wrote: post #348
pferde wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don't get. Why not just make your browser window narrower? Wikipedia is one of increasingly smaller set of sites which have the decency of NOT WASTING MY FRIGGING SCREEN SPACE by putting text into a narrowest of columns in the middle of my screen and leaving the sides empty. I get that line scannability is an issue for some people, but that's why _you_ can adjust the way _you_ read the article on _your…

Because I don't want to spend all day resizing my browser when I switch tabs? I want websites that are made to be read to optimize for legibility and comfort, not for "not wasting screen space." As I type this comment on HN, the right hand side of the text box where I type my comment is entirely empty. Should the text box be full-width so it fills the screen and doesn't "waste space"? Hell no. It would be a pain in t…

This is not at all about "dumbing down" or "information density", this is about choice and ability to consume content at one's own terms.

If a website leaves the text width to the reader (or their user agent), everybody wins, because everybody can read the text at their preferred width.

If, on the other side, a website tries to prescribe how wide the text should be, that choice is gone, and some readers inevitably lose.

So, no, my argument is not entirely symmetric - one approach gives everybody the same choice, the other one removes it.

To answer your "why don't you resize your window?", in the approach you seem to prefer, I do not have that option, because the website took that away from me, and no amount of resizing my window will change the text width the website dictates.

But as I mentioned, I already do go out of my way to configure my user agent to work for me, by means of a browser extension. Unless you want to take that choice away from me as well...?

(I will purposefully ignore your attempts at psychoanalyzing people over the internet based on a few bytes worth of text they wrote.)

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