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Wikipedia’s Redesign Is Barely Noticeable. That’s the Point.

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Re: Wikipedia’s Redesign Is Barely Noticeable. That’s the Point.

#51

Post by perihelions »

Here's the degradation on my 14" laptop. For me, it's a bit more than "noticeable"!

https://i.ibb.co/RzNWLjY/before.webp

https://i.ibb.co/B2W3Bt6/after.webp

It *really* doesn't degrade gracefully under a small amount of text scaling. I don't think they fully tested this redesign before deploying it; I don't think my configuration's an obscure edge case.

My complaints:

* Very narrow width for the main article body, where sidebars are present

* Far too large margins; incorrect scaling

* Jarring left/right asymmetry

* Undesirable scrollbars on internal elements (left Table of Contents); hinders navigation

* Space above and below left ToC is wasted and ugly

(To be transparent, I *did* cherry-pick this specific page so that I could show multiple issues in a single picture).

Re: Wikipedia’s Redesign Is Barely Noticeable. That’s the Point.

#52

Post by pwinnski »

mik1998 wrote: post #42
bastawhiz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also the perfect width to add a friends list or sidebar full of skeuomorphic widgets or live updating feed of edits to the site. There's no reason to assume Wikipedia would introduce advertising (they're not a corporation, they're not motivated by profit, they have a healthy chunk of cash in the bank). Of all the organizations I'd expect to give in to greed, Wikimedia doesn't crack the top 100.

They have been known for continuously lying in their banner advertisements for donations so I wouldn't be surprised if they ever finally sold out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

People keep making that claim, and yet when I ask for example of lying, I never seem to get anything.

Just asking for money while you already have money is not inherently lying. You might not like it, but lying involves making untrue statements. "We need your money" is not untrue, even if you already have a lot of money. "We need your money or else we'll shut down" would be untrue, but all of the pitches I've seen don't include anything like that.

Re: Wikipedia’s Redesign Is Barely Noticeable. That’s the Point.

#53

Post by rhn_mk1 »

trfzx wrote: post #49
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #37

Clearly designed by someone who only uses one language. The one most used element for me was the side bar, where I could hover over the language to see the translation of some term. Now it's hidden behind a click, and a looot of scrolling. Just try to reach Svenska. I can work around the style changes easily with custom CSS and stylus, but I'm not impressed by that change.

The extra click is an inconvenience that they also noted themselves. But it definitely was designed with multilingual use in mind, see here https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme...

Thank goodness they are not as hung up on having a button as it initially appears:

"We are currently considering adding single-click functionality for the most-frequently used languages."

Sadly, while that means that the overall experience will be improved, it will solve exactly nothing for those who are unlucky enough to use a less-frequently-used language.

Re: Wikipedia’s Redesign Is Barely Noticeable. That’s the Point.

#54

Post by trfzx »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #53
trfzx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extra click is an inconvenience that they also noted themselves. But it definitely was designed with multilingual use in mind, see here https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme...

Thank goodness they are not as hung up on having a button as it initially appears: "We are currently considering adding single-click functionality for the most-frequently used languages." Sadly, while that means that the overall experience will be improved, it will solve exactly nothing for those who are unlucky enough to use a less-frequently-used language.

I think they might mean most-frequently used of that user (I think the "suggested languages" already are supposed to work like that.) But that presumably requires an account.

Re: Wikipedia’s Redesign Is Barely Noticeable. That’s the Point.

#55

Post by rbancroft »

waboremo wrote: post #46
rbancroft wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any square button. 2/3rds of the horizontal real estate of my screen is empty... it's wasted space. This might look ok on a smaller monitor, but on 4K it is very sparse.

The button is at the bottom of the screen to the right. Visit an example page [1], and it should be there at the very bottom right corner. It is set to only appear on wide screens (1600px+), where the "wasted space" can actually be utilized. Seems being directly linked to pages doesn't show the new design sometimes if you aren't logged in. But I'll provide the page where they talk about the new theme itself and the e…

I wasn't expecting any controls to be outside the main grey area, so it's a bit weird the content width button is placed where it is. Also, I wonder if defaulting to wide mode when a wide monitor is detected is a better choice.

Either way, I don't have a strong opinion on whether its an improvement or regressive. Pretty much everything nowadays seems to be converging on a narrow column of text.

Re: Wikipedia’s Redesign Is Barely Noticeable. That’s the Point.

#56

Post by pwinnski »

Old skin, minimum width: https://ibb.co/Pcvn7VP

New skin, same width: https://ibb.co/PgxF8hf

Old skin, maximum width: https://ibb.co/WsptkCY

New Skin, same width: https://ibb.co/x8NmgZq

It's probably possible to find screen widths at which comparisons favor the old skin, but all I see is improvement. From old to new, minimum or maximum width, more content is visible, and line lengths are more readable. Kudos on the new design.

Re: Wikipedia’s Redesign Is Barely Noticeable. That’s the Point.

#57

Post by bastawhiz »

mik1998 wrote: post #42
bastawhiz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also the perfect width to add a friends list or sidebar full of skeuomorphic widgets or live updating feed of edits to the site. There's no reason to assume Wikipedia would introduce advertising (they're not a corporation, they're not motivated by profit, they have a healthy chunk of cash in the bank). Of all the organizations I'd expect to give in to greed, Wikimedia doesn't crack the top 100.

They have been known for continuously lying in their banner advertisements for donations so I wouldn't be surprised if they ever finally sold out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

I disagree with the very premise of this essay.

> Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn't it?

No, it sounds like running one of the most popular websites on the Internet requires well-paid employees, benefits, and infrastructure investment. 300 employees is two orders of magnitude fewer employees than Microsoft laid off this week. 300 employees to run one of the most trafficked and useful websites ever created is a strikingly small number.

Yes, I want wikipedia to have redundancy. Yes, I want Wikipedia to be resilient against incidents. Yes, I want them to have lawyers to respond to legal issues (both founded and malicious). Yes, I want them to invest in new projects that may or may not pan out into useful services like the ones I already enjoy (it's hard to appreciate how many Wikimedia offers).

If you told me that they spend $100M each year to keep the site online and running well, I'd believe you. A third of that is surprising because it's an astoundingly small number given the sheer amount of value that they create with it, especially for me personally.

Re: Wikipedia’s Redesign Is Barely Noticeable. That’s the Point.

#59

Post by AbrahamParangi »

I can't help but think Wikipedia would be a better product if it was still run on a shoestring budget.

The cash overhang of the Wikimedia Foundation means that the internal incentives are to overhire, and for those overhired employees to make work for themselves.

Re: Wikipedia’s Redesign Is Barely Noticeable. That’s the Point.

#60

Post by ryukoposting »

BeetleB wrote: post #38
yccs27 wrote: post #36

So many knee-jerk reactions by people disliking the change, so I want to give another view: I really like the new design. - When reading an article, I want to have absolutely minimal visual noise. Removing the old sidebar helps. - The smaller column width helps with readability, because it's easier to scan back to the start of the next line. - It's great to have the table of contents always visible, to quickly jump a…

I strongly dislike that the table of contents have folded entries. I now have to click to get the link to a subheading. In general, for quite a few things I need extra clicks to get to it. Also, as I mostly print articles[1], I had a special printing layout set up to print Wikipedia articles. I need to come up with a new layout (reader view for Wikipedia used to be terrible). [1] https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2021/Dec…

I agree. I think the redesign is good (and overdue) but hiding the table of contents by default is bad.
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