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Wikipedia is getting a new look

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461–470 of 529 posts

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#461
post #155
post #4

They could just make the mobile wiki the desktop default too. It is minimal, readable, and clean.

It's minimal and clean because everything is hidden. This is not a good thing, as it's impossible to search or skim.

Only on mobile, not on desktop.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#462
post #37
post #4

They could just make the mobile wiki the desktop default too. It is minimal, readable, and clean.

I hope not. I find the mobile wikipedia page awful. I always switch to the desktop site on my phone. Sections that start out collapsed is terrible for searching. Section headings that themselves are enormous is terrible for browsing. Even the text size is enormous by default - you don't get much of an overview.

> Sections that start out collapsed is terrible for searching

It doesn't collapse on desktop: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siena_Cathedral

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This to me is a testament to the fact that most buttons should actually be text unless extremely common like the hamburger menu, but even that's debatable. I agree, especially on mobile (even in 2020, many users — who often just got used to the hamburger menu — don't realize that the vertical ellipsis is a symbol for "menu" or "more options", it often just looks like a random decoration to them), although on a desk…

> I'll note though that the specific example of "文A" is, in fact, a text label. Only in the sense that those glyphs are used in certain writing systems. It's not text in the more important sense of expressing a linguistic message. It's just random characters. "文A" is a text label to exactly the same degree that ":-)" is a text label. Note in particular that the Chinese glyph does not translate as "language". That wou…

That's not quite true - 语 as in 汉语 is a spoken language or dialect. 文 is used for written language, and can mean a language in general, a writing system, or an entire culture, depending on what you combine it with.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#464
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New reddit feels like they hired 6 junior React developers and put a gun to their head telling them to rewrite the website in React in 6 months or else. It's unbelievably slow.

Funny yet accurate! I wonder what's causing them from sunsetting old.reddit...usage? An individual? I will never use new.reddit, I tried to once but it's such a poorer UX

I don’t think they are in a sense, as far as I know they have no plans of removing it.

That being said, using it once and then saying never again is kind of, not good. I’ve been on Reddit for almost a decade and while using the new design for the first time or even the first week was, painful I’ve fully embraced it now and can’t stand the old one.

I don’t find it painfully slow at all. In fact I find it faster overall when taking New features into account.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#465

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…

The combination of political opinion expressed in [1] + the author's wildly incorrect past statements is all I need to know that Wikipedia is doing things right: > Since 2002, Sanger has been critical of Wikipedia's accuracy. ... [In 2007], Sanger again criticized Wikipedia, stating it was "broken beyond repair" and had a range of problems "from serious management problems, to an often dysfunctional community, to fre…

Sanger will never forgive Wikipedia for getting along just fine without him.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#466
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 use the sidebar all the time to look at different language articles.

some are quite understandable, and some i can google translate.

for a multilingual person, that bar is indispensable..

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware, thanks, I'm a developer. That makes the column width wider as well. What you want is a thin column and a large font size, and you can't expect regular users to zoom in.

Ah, so the problem is that the designer used rem or a mix of em/rem units. I personally use Pixels in everything that way the entire thing zooms and all relationships are proportional.

My takeaway from your comment and my experience is that CSS is a mess of a technology. Oh well.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use Ctrl(Cmd) and + sign to zoom.

I'm aware, thanks, I'm a developer. That makes the column width wider as well. What you want is a thin column and a large font size, and you can't expect regular users to zoom in.

Regular users won't have a 4k display, or they would have detected the problem in testing. If you have unusual requirements such as a very high ppi display, you can set a minimum font size in your client browser, just as the web was intended to be used since the beginning.

The original idea of the web as a publishing medium was that visualization could be determined by the needs and preferences of the final user, and thankfully the technology still allows for it.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#469
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For English-French translation in Québec, have a look at http://m.gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/index.aspx

That's quite a stack of subdomains, any sense to those? .qc.ca I can recognize, and gouv is for gouvernment.

So you've got 3, the m at the start is obvious - there's only two left and they're both spelt out in the header of the webpage.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#470

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.

I just hope you can still simply hover your mouse over the languages links to see the translation without having to click and go to the foreign language article.
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