Wikipedia Is Getting Its First Major Redesign In a Decade (wikimedia.org) 83
koavf writes: In order to make the desktop experience more readable and less overwhelming to new users, Wikipedia is being redesigned to move page elements, collapse in the sidebar, and decrease the maximum line width. From Diff, the Wikimedia community blog:
Forthcoming changes to the desktop include a reconfigured logo, collapsible sidebar, table of contents, and more! You can see the full list of new features on MediaWiki. These changes will happen incrementally over a long period of time, to allow for ample user testing and feedback. If all goes to plan, these improvements will be the default on all wikis by the end of 2021, timed with Wikipedia's 20th birthday celebrations.
Change (Score:3)
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Trendy clean UI means it has to be unusable (Score:5, Insightful)
I assume they will, fashionably, make it totally unclear what is a button that can be clicked and what is just text.
Because "clean".
Design Wankers.
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I came late to Reddit, only discovered it a couple of months ago.
FARK ME !
How can a company as rich as Reddit have SUCH A SHIT, UGLY, UNUSABLE WEBSITE ?!
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Hint: old.reddit.com
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Funnily enough I have a tab open to an old.reddit.com page right now.
But I wouldn't call it well-designed, attractive or user-friendly.
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Re: Trendy clean UI means it has to be unusable (Score:2)
Re:Trendy clean UI means it has to be unusable (Score:4, Informative)
>"assume they will, fashionably, make it totally unclear what is a button that can be clicked and what is just text.
Because "clean".
Bingo.
Inotherwords, it will be some stupid "phone" interface on my huge monitor, where I can't display what I want, can't find the controls, and if I can find them, will require numerous clicks each time.
I do wish this type of design crap would DIE.
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Re:Trendy clean UI means it has to be unusable (Score:5, Insightful)
I assume they will, fashionably, make it totally unclear what is a button that can be clicked and what is just text.
Because "clean".
Design Wankers.
Yep. If it hasn't been touched for a decade it's because IT'S WORKING JUST FINE.
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IT'S WORKING JUST FINE.
Translation: We're hemorrhaging users because our stuff looks too out of date to be cool, but not out of date enough to be hipster.
No I'm serious. It may not apply in this case since they are a reference site, but stagnated UI design directly leads to losing users over time. That's one of the reasons companies pay a lot of money to rearrange the deck chairs. If it doesn't "look different" then it can't be "new or up to date".
Re: Trendy clean UI means it has to be unusable (Score:1)
Exactly, in an era of ever wonder screens, why don't we limit our website's content's width to 500 px and add horrible margins?
Also, in an era of devices with widely different screen estates, from phones with nearly none to desktops with loads, why don't we make a phone UI and shove it on desktop users too?
I understand why for profit websites like reddit make awful UIs, to force users to log in and/or use their app so they can be monetized and trapped, but why the fuck would wikipedia go the same insane roa
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No, apparently just waste more space while making the fonts smaller.. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki... [mediawiki.org]
The picture with the cleaner layout and larger fonts is the before...
I was just thinking (Score:1)
Browsing Wikipedia earlier today and distinctly remember thinking that it is amazing Wikipedia has not yet managed to fuck up their site with mobile first (e.g. desktop users can go fuck themselves) BS as is extraordinarily popular these days.
Changes in this case are not what I would characterize as a major redesign and thankfully do not seem to be obnoxious either.
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My thoughts exactly were , "This isn't going to end well", followed by remembering how well redesign went over here at /.
Why can't the corporate twits be kept away from user interfaces?
Re:I was just thinking (Score:4, Interesting)
Wikipedia’s current interface does suck. However the one change which probably would improve many people’s experience - allowing for adjustable font size - isn’t listed.
That feature has been in “beta” on the mobile version for years. I’m not sure why it’s never seen the light of day outside of that.
Re: I was just thinking (Score:3)
My phone has faster internet than my cable connection, and more resolution than my desktop monitor.
I don't see why websites insist on acting like I want the page to load in small slivers and low resolution images (wikipedia isn't too bad for this, but many news sites use low resolution graphics on the mobile site making charts unreadable even when zoomed in (if they let me zoom)).
I want to be able to use "find in
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I'd love for the mobile version to have an expand all button at the top, or default to expanded.
Oh yeah, I'm 100% with you there. I'm not sure why they think requiring multiple clicks is somehow easier than just scrolling - especially since there's going to be scrolling anyway, unless a particular section is extremely succinct.
Re: I was just thinking (Score:1)
> I'd love for the mobile version to have an expand
> all button at the top, or default to expanded.
It does. Go to hamburger menu > settings > Expand all sections.
It is remembered between visits, even if not logged in.
Re: I was just thinking (Score:2)
It there a way to slide out an article's table of contents on mobile?
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Not that I've found, though I've not looked recently and these things change over time.
Technically, the information/markup is all there so there might be a way of doing it with some custom JS/CSS, and Wikipedia allows users to add custom CSS/JS pretty easily. You'd need to be logged-in, though.
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Browsing Wikipedia earlier today and distinctly remember thinking that it is amazing Wikipedia has not yet managed to fuck up their site with mobile first (e.g. desktop users can go fuck themselves) BS as is extraordinarily popular these days.
That's because mobile users are sent to a completely different web site than desktop users when they visit.
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I find Wikipedia works incredibly well on a phone, in fact, better than most "mobile" sites.
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Wonder if they're just going to the modified format that Wikipedia uses in some other languages. For example, compare the layouts between the French Wikipedia (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9volution_fran%C3%A7aise) to the English one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution). The French one seems much cleaner and readable, IMHO.
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French community and these others wanted to help improve it https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki... [mediawiki.org]
English community is more disagreeable.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Please, please tell me.. (Score:5, Informative)
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Seems simple enough, why do I doubt that what the customer wanted is going to end up being delivered?
Oh yeah, 40+ years of seeing this cartoon as the best demonstration of IT design processes [imgur.com]
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So just wasting more space and make the fonts smaller... I am sure that is what people want.
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In principle, margins improve readability. Lines of text that are several hundred characters long result in much less reading (and consequently, much less comprehension or learning).
The left and right margins are unchanged ;)
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Max line width (Score:5, Insightful)
I will never understand why designers feel the need to artificially limit the width of the page.
If it's too wide, I can very easily make the window smaller; if it's too narrow because they designed in that way, I can't easily make it wider to my own taste.
Margins (Score:3, Insightful)
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Sure, let's limit html design and usage to what Gutenberg faced when printing books...
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It is about giving the user control and not assuming that they are idiots
Maybe they are on a small device and ANY page formatting or multiple frame margins make their device unusable, even more so if they have vision issues and use a large font
Maybe they have a very large device and WANT to see as much text as possible, or maybe they are keen enough to size the window to what they want and do not want other people deciding what a suitable page is
fyi, went to art school and worked for a short time with type
Re:Margins (Score:4, Interesting)
The limit was never the size of the page. It was human visual acuity and tracking ability. Margins are good, and columns are better, but they should conform to the dimensions of the window they are in. Assuming that the user browses in full screen and designing your layout to basically require it is greedy and rude.
We don't necessarily need to go back as far as Gutenberg for good design. Knuth's reasoning when designing TeX would be a pretty good choice.
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We don't necessarily need to go back as far as Gutenberg for good design. Knuth's reasoning when designing TeX would be a pretty good choice.
Definitely. Here's a very thorough explanation in stackexchange: Why are default LaTeX margins so big? [stackexchange.com]
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Margins are fine. One can have margins without the ridiculousness like some sites that squeeze everything into 40-50% of the width of the window, with vast seas of whitespace around it.
I would guess this change will tend toward that "wtf" category. I hope I'm wrong.
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I far prefer it when long articles display themselves in a column so I don't have to move the windows around. I think I'm in the majority of the web viewing populace. But I acknowledge your desire for arbitrarily wide text. I can see the value of a slider of some sort that lets you widen the reading column into that vast whitespace.
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That other 50-60% that's wasted and useless whitespace by your standards (And mine, actually. I hate this trend too.) is wasted by design. And, my own qualification and the claims of some of the apologists aside, it's not a design trend aimed at anything resembling usability. And it's either not really blank; or it won't be for long. That wasted space either has ads that you're not seeing because you block them, or will have ads that you're not seeing because the site hasn't sold them yet.
It's a money g
Re:Margins (Score:4, Insightful)
They're called ads. Web pages have been using them for years to improve the site's acquisition price.
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Everything is optimized for a phone now with three words per line with a giant font. That and having to click to reveal the rest of a sentence. Jesus like a paragraphs worth of text is going to bloat a page with 500kb of javascript code running.
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You're not understanding. It's totally ok to have margins. The user can have as much space beside the window as they want. 1px? No problem. 1000px? No problem. This is about imposing a maximum content width, so there will be more margin than the user asked for, unless they correct the error by reducing the size of their window.
Since they're changing something that the user already controlled (so therefore it's always defined as perfect), it therefore must be motivated by wanting to work against the user in
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Margins are great for readability.
The problem however though is that there are stupid web designers who take up 25% of the screen width for the left margin and 25% of the screen width for the right margin leaving a shitty non-resizable 50% of the page width for actual content -- wasting literally HALF of the page for these stupid margins.
A good default for a printed 8.5" x 11" page are 1" inch margins; roughly 2/8.5 = 24% for both left and right margins which is a good balance between a whitespace border an
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They're called margins. Printers have been using them for centuries to improve readability. The human eye needs white space around it to focus on the text.
It's almost as if you've never seen one of those things called "book" or "newspaper".
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Personally, I can live with the restricted content width. If it's really horrible, I'll copy it into a text editor. Among other things, it gives a sense of consistency with what the creator intended. One advantage is that the text isn't re-paginating when the window size changes (within limits) or when other page content loads and/or shifts things around.
However, when the number of characters per line becomes too low (e.g. painfully narrow or large fonts), it becomes annoying to follow sentences across seve
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I will never understand why designers feel the need to artificially limit the width of the page.
This is the only thing I don't like about the redesign, either. (Yes, people commenting above and in other threads: you don't need to guess. You can RTFA and there is a link to the changes.) I suppose I'm in the minority in that I don't blindly maximize my browser window regardless of screen size but rather size it (and all my windows--maximizing everything seems to be a habit lots of Windows users have) appropriately for my screen size on that device and the content I'm viewing.
And I think Wikipedia chose
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>"I will never understand why designers feel the need to artificially limit the width of the page."
It is the same stupid-ass assumption that web designers now feel that every browser window is going to be super-wide and FORCE you to have to stupid horizontal scroll bar when you want the window to be narrower (for any number of very valid reasons- maybe I have a narrow monitor. Maybe I am using a PORTRAIT monitor. Maybe I want to have TWO applications visible at the same time, side by side). It drives
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I will never understand why designers feel the need to artificially limit the width of the page. If it's too wide, I can very easily make the window smaller; if it's too narrow because they designed in that way, I can't easily make it wider to my own taste.
I too can change the width of my window. But from observing how other people use their desktop browsers, I think you and I are in the ~1% minority of people who get this.
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Probably an unpopular opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
But the UI change I'd really like to see is the ability to opt-out of their donation nags. I understand what they're trying to do, but the way they present it is every bit as annoying as those "Punch the monkey and win an iPhone!" ads. It makes their decision to not accept commercial sponsorship seem to be one of holding themselves to an arbitrary purity standard, rather than born from a desire to provide a good user experience.
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If you donate, you can make those go away. It's better than ads, where if you buy the product, you get more ads. :-)
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Yes, it's for purity.
No, it's not for an "experience".
Is there something wrong with that? There's a lot of other places to go if you want "an experience" or customer service or whatever.
Unnecessary (Score:5, Insightful)
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. This type of UI tweaking is bound to make things worse, not better.
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But the data collected from users on several fronts suggests that it is broken. New users report having problems using the site -- they can read ok, but joining in to help edit articles is overwhelming. And as mentioned in the article, even just reading has some difficulties.
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People are morons.
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Indeed. We are all morons when we are outside of our domains and encountering new things. The goal of UX is to figure out how to onboard morons, train them to be experts, and not be annoying once they are experts. It's a tricky balance.
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Besides, if you login with your user account, you can select from a number of themes. I imagine all they're doing is adding a new theme and setting it as default. Users will likely be able to select the old theme for their account if they want to. Hopefully, since I don't use the default theme when logged in.
I hear (Score:2)
they're replacing all spaces with tiny emails from Kimmy asking for money
Why? (Score:1)
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Won't last long (Score:2)
Be Still my Soul... (Score:2)
SOMEBODY is editing the style sheets? Yikes guys , say it isn't so...
Single version for Mobile and Desktop (Score:2)
I hope the redesign makes a single version that works on mobile or desktop like most websites. Really annoying to get a link from a mobile user on desktop and have it not take advantage of my screenspace
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Bluffing (Score:2)
ars gratia artis (Score:2)
ars gratia artis. Er, or more exactly, change for change's sake. I look forward to an even less usable Wikipedia, but beautiful enough to hang on my wall.
They should call it "Beta" (Score:1)