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Wikipedia is getting a new look

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Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#491

Post by DHPersonal »

davidivadavid wrote: post #489
pferde wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

Everybody can always read at their preferred width provided they do what's necessary to get there . Resize window. Modify CSS. You can always do that. My point is that the smart default is to minimize having to make any change. The question is what the smart default is. Defaulting to full width text means that most of the time, on a large desktop monitor, I need to resize my window to adapt to the text (different fon…

I’ve seen the “stop limiting my column width” argument presented on HN on many occasions and each time it seems to be an argument of optimization: let the user decide how to better process the information. That works well for people who argue that most things can and should be handled via a terminal window, but the average user doesn’t think that way. An average user expects curation.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#492

Post by thaumasiotes »

Kliment wrote: post #463
thaumasiotes wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> depending on what you combine it with

It's standing alone here. I'm aware of words like 文明 and 中文, but here are the 14 glosses for 文 in the 现代汉语规范词典:

1. (verb) to tattoo or paint patterns or words onto a body

2. (noun, literary) a pattern, particularly as of wood grain

3. (noun) ancient rites/ceremonies

4. (noun) non-military affairs (opposite of 武)

5. (adjective) gentle; not fierce

6. (noun) indicating phenomena of nature or of human society

7. (noun) writing

8. (noun) an essay

9. (noun) the humanities and social sciences

10. (noun) an official document

11. (noun) Classical Chinese (the language that is to China as Latin is to southern Europe)

12. (measure word) used for the copper coins of traditional China

13. (verb) to cover; hide

14. A surname

Most of these senses come from words that include the morpheme 文, not from uses it permits alone, but "language" is still not even listed.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#493

Post by def_true_false »

corentin88 wrote: post #440
beshrkayali wrote: post #438

The most underrated thing about websites that have kept a working design/ui/ux/whatever for a few years or more is that people are used to them. I know where the search bar is, I know where to switch language and where to exactly point my attention to find what I’m looking for. Even if something is not exactly right, or doesn’t make sense to some expert UI designer, you really don’t have to change it. I’m seriously w…

That’s something I’m a huge fan in G Suite. The UI changes very slightly, most of the time you don’t even notice, but the number of new features that the team ship is incredible.

Not sure about G Suite, but Gmail UX/UI seems to get worse with every other update -- it's cluttered with unrelated stuff, like Google's chat attempt of the month, and unbearably slow. Searching for text with diacritics is broken, even though it used to work a couple years back. Kind of absurd for a search company.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#494

Post by def_true_false »

cxr wrote: post #237
systemvoltage wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, this is worse in every way. Too much white space. Literally every website today needs to reduce the padding and margins by 80% and they could present the same data in dense, single page without scrolling. Also large fonts need to die. I love HN because I can see so much in one shot, can always increase fonts with Ctrl +

> Also large fonts need to die It's possible that you're browsing on some configuration that makes Wikiwand display "large fonts" (mobile device? even then I haven't been able to reproduce), but Wikiwand isn't using large fonts. In fact, articles' font-size is set to 100% of the UA's preferred font-size, and then they use use a third-party font ("Lora") which actually makes text smaller than your typical serif font r…

1. UA config doesn't even enter into this. No one the new design is supposed to help doesn't know how to configure their UA or even what it is.

2. Consider these 3 images: https://postimg.cc/gallery/X78M9ms

2 of them have normal sized text and 1 has a text that looks good on the designer's macbook. As it happens, the latter is borderline unusable -- an article not longer than a handful of tweets doesn't even fit on one page.

P.S. Until today, I genuinely thought that wikiwand was some kind of ad farm, from seeing it pop up in google search.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#495

Post by davidivadavid »

DHPersonal wrote: post #491
davidivadavid wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody can always read at their preferred width provided they do what's necessary to get there . Resize window. Modify CSS. You can always do that. My point is that the smart default is to minimize having to make any change. The question is what the smart default is. Defaulting to full width text means that most of the time, on a large desktop monitor, I need to resize my window to adapt to the text (different fon…

I’ve seen the “stop limiting my column width” argument presented on HN on many occasions and each time it seems to be an argument of optimization: let the user decide how to better process the information. That works well for people who argue that most things can and should be handled via a terminal window, but the average user doesn’t think that way. An average user expects curation.

Right. I think there's a case to be made for a distinction between letting the user decide, and making the user decide. Customisation should be possible, but not necessary, especially for the most common use cases.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#496

Post by pferde »

davidivadavid wrote: post #489
pferde wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

Everybody can always read at their preferred width provided they do what's necessary to get there . Resize window. Modify CSS. You can always do that. My point is that the smart default is to minimize having to make any change. The question is what the smart default is. Defaulting to full width text means that most of the time, on a large desktop monitor, I need to resize my window to adapt to the text (different fon…

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. You prefer narrower lines, I like my lines as wide as my browser window allows. For me, it's more comfortable reading text with long lines and having to scroll less, than having shorter lines and having to scroll often.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#497

Post by aembleton »

cmckn wrote: post #333
aembleton wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I've never seen wikiwand before but it is a big improvement. It is missing those pop over windows that wikipedia has when you hover over a link though.

The popovers work for me in the latest Chromium (if we're talking about the same thing)! I love those. I do think Wikiwand goes a bit too far in the "slick" direction; Wikipedia is more functional. But it's nice to play with an alternative.

They also work in Firefox when you allow JS from wikipedia. I had blocked 3rd party JS.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#498

Post by jdlrobson »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #401
jdlrobson wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 multilin…

> 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. Multilingual sites aren't rare at all. There is a conventional way to display a language selector: it's a button (usually a dropdown menu, if you click on it) with a national flag and the name of the language. The big problem on mobile wikipedia is…

Using a national flag is a really bad UX pattern given the political ramifications and potentially offensive. Languages are not owned by countries. I am not aware of a multilingual site that provides over 200 languages in such a way that its country neutral (switching to a Spain based shopping site is not the same as switching to Spanish)?

As I've said before the mobile site doesn't remove it. It just changes the mechanism for understandable reasons based on the medium.

Nice to chat to you.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#499

Post by capableweb »

rocho wrote: post #409
capableweb wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a US-normal laptop 1MB of JS might not matter too much. But for a world-normal laptop + smartphone, the size of the bundle does matter, not just for bandwidth but for performance as well. Larger JS scripts takes longer time to parse so if you have a lower power device, it still gonna suck. Everything around your program matters, but for different audiences. Wikipedias reach is huge, and getting it to work and work…

True, but for apps which are meant to be interactive you also need to take into account SPAs that might make very small requests for a good while once the main bundle has been downloaded. So, for a world-normal device which one is better? A site that downloads 1MB of Javascript and then makes data requests of a few KBs or a site that makes a 300KB request with a page reload every time you interact with it? My general…

I agree fully with you! My point was not that the bundle size matters the most, but rather than everything matters. What matters most depends on your user-base of course. Expensive, professional tools that only works on Mac: fine with high requirements and bandwidth requirements. Free service whos goal is to spread knowledge everywhere in the world: need to think about cheapest devices on the worst networks.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#500

Post by Atomskun »

kalleboo wrote: post #437
userbinator wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people complain about line length when that really means you should just resize the window to your preference. On the other hand, pages that stay in a narrow column in the middle when I widen the window really infuriate me, because I explicitly asked for wider columns and am not getting it.

My experience is that most people who were raised on Windows will just full-screen everything. Long-time Mac users are more likely to use sized-to-fit windows.

Why do you think is that? Genuinely curious. There's nothing in Windows that prominently wants you to have everything maximized (ignoring the semi-new tablet mode; windowing behavior stems from a time long before that).

macOS, on the other hand, explicitly advertised having an "immersive" fullscreen mode (with a dedicated button in the past).

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