Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wikipedia Redefined

wikipediaredefined.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 305 posts

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#71

Post by mbrubeck »

saraid216 wrote: post #60
languagehacker wrote: post #51

I work at Wikia, which means I work with MediaWiki every day. I was kind of offended by how naive New is New is being. I don't think they have any grasp on the sort of massive scope changes like this would require. Wikipedia is not MediaWiki's only consumer. A lot of communities that use MediaWiki are extremely conservative about the UI, so some of the conservatism is by design. The WikiMedia Foundation is working on…

> And don't get me started on the proposed Wikipedia logo. It looks like the Wikia fractal with way less nodes. I found it offensive that they felt the English 'W' was the only one worth featuring in the logo.

To be fair, Wikipedia already uses a "W" as its favicon in every locale (even for languages with non-Latin scripts, like Japanese and Arabic):

http://ja.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico

http://ar.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#72

Post by primigenus »

tptacek wrote: post #27

You'd probably want any redesign of Wikipedia to start with the understanding that the front page of the English Wikipedia isn't WWW.WIKIPEDIA.ORG, it's EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG, and that that page is dominated by content --- most notably the WP Featured Articles, which are a core part of the Wikipedia community. Draw the pretty colored lines after you grok the concept. It goes downhill for me as they try to get more technic…

> It does not have, as its primary goal, the delight of random web users.

But it could. And that's really the point of this exercise: showing one way that it could additionally delight users, on top of providing the critical functionality it already does.

Delighting users is one step up[1] from what Wikipedia does right now. Yes, they're doing something of fundamental importance to the human race. But does that mean that the software needs to be bleak, emotionless, and, let's face it, not very enjoyable to work with?

[1] See Aarron Walter's Emotional Interface Design as described here: http://thinkvitamin.com/design/emotional-interface-design-th... for a great explanation

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#73

Post by primigenus »

bcgraham wrote: post #63
tptacek wrote: post #27

You'd probably want any redesign of Wikipedia to start with the understanding that the front page of the English Wikipedia isn't WWW.WIKIPEDIA.ORG, it's EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG, and that that page is dominated by content --- most notably the WP Featured Articles, which are a core part of the Wikipedia community. Draw the pretty colored lines after you grok the concept. It goes downhill for me as they try to get more technic…

Can you provide a link to the Brand New Blog or some additional search terms? I'm interested, but "brand new blog" and "brand new blog logo" Google searches don't seem to bring up anything relevant.

This is the Brand New blog: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#74

Post by sazpaz »

Obviously, Wikipedia is an extremely useful educational resource, and I think it's even more powerful in developing countries, which usually lack of academic materials. Making changes that rise the technological barrier of entry for many users doesn't seem adequate to me.

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#75

Post by pbreit »

estel wrote: post #37
tptacek wrote: post #27

You'd probably want any redesign of Wikipedia to start with the understanding that the front page of the English Wikipedia isn't WWW.WIKIPEDIA.ORG, it's EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG, and that that page is dominated by content --- most notably the WP Featured Articles, which are a core part of the Wikipedia community. Draw the pretty colored lines after you grok the concept. It goes downhill for me as they try to get more technic…

Anecdotally, the overwhelming majority of people who I've observed using Wikipedia go to www.wikipedia.com and then select "English".

Maybe what was meant was that, of those who go to Wikipedia directly, not through Google, they usually go through www.wikipeida.org or wikipedia.org, not en.wikipedia.org. I would agree with that assessment.

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#76

Post by dinkumthinkum »

Wow that's ugly. When did minimalism and copying Google's get mistaken fir creativity?

I'm kinda over the whole "hey. we're all cool people. let's get together and do stuff." design aesthetic. It was cute for a time but let's move on.

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#77

Post by icebraining »

citricsquid wrote: post #13

copying my comment from reddit: If a user doesn't recognise the word "English" then they are not going to have any idea what language select. The reason the languages are all listed on the page without any interaction needed is so someone can look at the webpage and recognise their language and select it without having to understand anything else. How do I access the main page of a wiki? This isn't redefined, it's ju…

That's what Accept-Language[1] is for. They can just serve the right version of the page based on its value. And yes, I know it's annoying when sites just assume you speak the browser language but remember this would just set the default one in the text box, nothing else. Presumably, if you're using a browser in English you can also recognize the word "English" and change it to something else.

[1]: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14...

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#78

Post by patrickmclaren »

Sent this email to them:

" Absolutely terrible; increasing the signal/noise ratio, in addition to increasing unnecessary white space were extremely bad design choices.

The purpose of Wikipedia is to share information. The changes that you proposed impede that goal by the addition of a step where the user has to "understand" the design, before they can begin to use it.

You should have reviewed mathematical and scientific journals before you begun your sketch work. Those types of publications succeed at transmitting a high amount of information, very quickly. Bare HTML pages also succeed at transmitting technical information at a very fast rate.

Rather than just stating that Wikipedia is in need of a redesign, state your reasons. The design of Wikipedia is not simply an aesthetic designer's problem, it is a problem that has to be approached from an engineering point of view: maximise the information communication rate whilst keeping the design aesthetically pleasing, not the other way around."

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#79

Post by runemadsen »

dt7 wrote: post #31

Interesting proposals, but like Andy Rutledge's NYT re-design ( http://andyrutledge.com/news-redux.php ) limited by the practicalities of implementing them. I don't think the Wikimedia foundation has the resources to do any kind of major re-design, at least not quickly.

I agree. There are so many of these "awesome redesigns" around that totally miss the point. First of all, design is not chrome. It never has been and never will be. Design is the combination of form and content, but all of these redesigns are 100% form. Content is always sacrificed in these attempts.

If a person like Andy Ruthledge had worked at the NYTimes, he would know that a number of this country's best designers are working on that site, and it's not just a matter of sitting down in Photoshop to do a redesign. You should never lose readers for the sake of new colors. Not to mention how the nytimes.com is an enormous site with layers and layers of interplaying systems. Making stuff like this mostly looks like a young designer saying "this is what you should do", but feels like a young designer saying "I don't have a clue about how things work".

Re: Wikipedia Redefined

#80

Post by saraid216 »

thebigshane wrote: post #64
saraid216 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These ideas would probably be better achieved using a browser add-on of some kind.

Not if you want it to be popular (read: IE users, high school and college students, other "normal" people). (Ok, yes, a browser add-on would be better for someone like me. But I don't think my need is very unique.)

Most people who really care about this functionality are already using external tools to handle it. EndNote and Scrivener come to mind off the top of my head.

But more to the point, the plugin wouldn't make it Wikipedia-only. Doing research involves more than Wikipedia.

Post reply on HN