I couldn't care less about a proposed redesign of wikipedia by a random design agency. but I do gotta give props to their marketing department.
Wikipedia Redefined
81–90 of 305 posts
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Me too, but let me add that I think it is also worth considering that they may not be there to search. For that reason it feels a bit weird to make www.wikipedia.org a crappy version of www.google.com...
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotally, the overwhelming majority of people who I've observed using Wikipedia go to www.wikipedia.com and then select "English".
Could you contextualize what population you're drawing your sample from, please?
English speaking people, presumably.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#84I 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…
I highly highly doubt that this is an actual appeal by them to change the MediaWiki interface. I see this purely as a publicity stunt / marketing move, intended to get their brand and abilities out there in front of people. And to be frank, I think they're being quite successful at that. UX/practicality aside, most of the components do look good. (though good parts of it remind me of Google, Quora, and other prominen…
They seem to be very effective and successful, until you see their incapability of grasping their advised Wiki logo's and Wordpress logos similarity. That's where they just fail.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#85You'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…
I think it already delights users. Wikipedia is so absolutely content and hyperlink driven that it hardly needs much else. It's immense popularity and ubiquity is proof of that. I draw my delight not from some invasive graphics and UI work, but from the fact that when I want to read about Pyramids, I click a link on Google to Pyramids (or on the Wikipedia front page) and ALL I SEE IS PYRAMIDS. No other UI, no other stuff to interfere with what I'm trying to do. And from there, I click hyperlinks and quickly jump from Pyramids to Ancient Engineering to Trigonometry to the various mathematicians who have improved on the work the Egyptians did.
The delight is in the speed at which I can quickly explore and consume human knowledge. Nothing I've seen in terms of graphical suggestions would improve that - only distract or prevent my friends in other countries from being able to use it properly.
To me, Wikipedia is embodiment of "less is more", which supposedly all of these hotshot designers are supposed to subscribe to, but apparently mistranslate it to "a metric butt-load of negative space".
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#86The biggest problem I have with this sort of thing -- actually probably the whole field(s) of UI/UX design -- is that there is no actual prototype but it seems like they are implying that the programmers didn't include any of those features because they didn't think of them, and that now the real work for the 'redesign' has been done. As if the hard part was making a bunch of pictures.
So this whole thing really irritates me.
Having said that, I think that modernizing Wikipedia or MediaWiki is a an interesting idea (although probably not a priority), and this is actually a decent starting point for discussing how many of the new (mainly, but not entirely, stylistic) UI/UX trends (principles in a few cases I guess) could be applied.
I mean obviously their nav takes up more space than necessary and we don't need Wikipedia's logo to look just like WordPress's, but the minimalism, alternate typography of some sort, monochrome icon widgets, etc. are apparently now required in order to qualify as contemporary design. And the connection clouds and highlighter quote idea is cool. And it probably wouldn't hurt to remove one or two of the buttons on the editor or move them to an advanced section, or spend an hour or two making the editor looking more contemporary.
In case anyone actually reads this, I have a question. Is the thing where buttons and controls are monochrome icons (and usually with no 3d appearance), is that going to stay? I mean, is there a reason you can't have multiple colors in icons now? Also it seems a lot of times you don't get labels on buttons anymore (I know, tooltips). How much of this stuff is likely to stick for the next 5, 10 years, or is it just a short term fad? I mean I coded a UI recently for a component platform thing I am building (actual functional software platform, not pictures) and it had multicolor traditional icons on normal 3d buttons with labels. This UX guy saw that and said I was 'completely out of touch'. So I took the labels, 3d and colors off the buttons.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#87> ...and decided to eliminate, ahem, everything except... …the letter W, which is/could be the most famous W in the whole web.
Wikipedia is available in 275 languages, and the current logo at least acknowledges that there are other writing systems and that this is not just an English encyclopaedia.
Changing it for a W is a complete disregard of the significance of Wikipedia as a multilingual reference work.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#88Proposed Wikipedia logo: http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/img/4.png Actual WordPress logo: http://s.wordpress.org/about/images/logos/wordpress-logo-sta... (It's not just that both are W's -- they also chose a typeface with a similar distinctive swoosh.)
>the letter W, which is/could be the most famous W in the whole web. W is enough for Wikipedia to be recognized. I read this and thought the same thing, "What about Wordpress?"
Wordpress isn't very well-known by the general public. I mean hell, it's not even in the same ballpark compared to Wikipedia.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#89Wikipedia doesn't need a redesign. It just needs to have an easy preferences setting for "I am a deletionist" vs "I am an inclusionist" or whatever the current preferred designations are. The deletionists get pared-down, guaranteed notable content, and the inclusionists get the mess.
This distinction is only relevant to maybe 1% of wikipedia users...the heavy users who get involved in internal politics and editing decisions (and maybe the spammers who try to wield wikipedia's massive visibility for their own purposes). The average wikipedia user has no idea there are deletion wars.
I don't think thats the kind of deletion vs inclusion he was referring to, though you are 100% correct. I think what he meant was there should be a setting you can choose to view a minimalist version of the site.
Re: Wikipedia Redefined
#90I'm glad Wikipedia is nothing remotely like that.