Wikipedia Has Spent Years on a Barely Noticeable Redesign (slate.com) 138
The Wikipedia editors are waiting to hear you scream. On Wednesday, Wikipedia is set to make its new skin the default on English Wikipedia -- its first new skin since 2010 -- and the team of designers and volunteer editors are waiting with some mix of excitement and trepidation. From a report: On Sunday, several dozen Wikipedia editors nursed cocktails in midtown Manhattan at the afterparty for Wikipedia Day, the annual celebration of Wikipedia's Jan. 14, 2001, founding. The group -- a nerdy crowd of librarians, students, software engineers, and others who spend their free time creating an encyclopedia -- usually meets in quiet libraries instead of ritzy open bars, but this was a special occasion: Wikipedia's 22nd birthday (as well as its 21st and 20th, which the group had only commemorated online). Plus, someone had offered the space as a donation.
Gathered on a leather couch, speaking loudly over the DJ's groovy music, their conversation meandered from class-action lawsuits against a water park to bird photography to Vector 2022, Wikipedia's first big redesign in 12 years, set to debut as the default on English Wikipedia on Wednesday. Eyes lit up. People leaned in. Anticipation was palpable. "We're going to be able to hear screams from space," joked a Wikimedian who goes by the username Enterprisey, who has spent months contributing to the redesign. Pharos, a longtime contributor, mentioned that Swahili Wikipedia had unanimously voted to reject the new skin and curtly demanded a return to the old skin. "I had never seen Swahili Wikipedia so outspoken about something. Pretty exciting," he said.
For all the hype, Vector 2022 isn't dramatically different -- that's why it shares a name with the previous skin, Vector 2010. All the scaffolding is the same: Wikipedia is still Wikipedia, just with more whitespace, a more prominent search bar and language switcher, and a sticky table of contents. There's also a collapsible sidebar and maximum line width, which make the site more clean and less cluttered. But those changes have been scrupulously discussed and debated (over and over and over). Wikipedia is not the scrappy web experiment it once was. [...] But it doesn't look all that different than it did 23 years ago, when it was run by a few guys in an office in Florida. The text-heavy website resembles an email inbox, or Craigslist, or Old Reddit. It's a barrage of straightforward white and blue text, a rather unsightly assemblage of lines and squares. It's not trendy.
Gathered on a leather couch, speaking loudly over the DJ's groovy music, their conversation meandered from class-action lawsuits against a water park to bird photography to Vector 2022, Wikipedia's first big redesign in 12 years, set to debut as the default on English Wikipedia on Wednesday. Eyes lit up. People leaned in. Anticipation was palpable. "We're going to be able to hear screams from space," joked a Wikimedian who goes by the username Enterprisey, who has spent months contributing to the redesign. Pharos, a longtime contributor, mentioned that Swahili Wikipedia had unanimously voted to reject the new skin and curtly demanded a return to the old skin. "I had never seen Swahili Wikipedia so outspoken about something. Pretty exciting," he said.
For all the hype, Vector 2022 isn't dramatically different -- that's why it shares a name with the previous skin, Vector 2010. All the scaffolding is the same: Wikipedia is still Wikipedia, just with more whitespace, a more prominent search bar and language switcher, and a sticky table of contents. There's also a collapsible sidebar and maximum line width, which make the site more clean and less cluttered. But those changes have been scrupulously discussed and debated (over and over and over). Wikipedia is not the scrappy web experiment it once was. [...] But it doesn't look all that different than it did 23 years ago, when it was run by a few guys in an office in Florida. The text-heavy website resembles an email inbox, or Craigslist, or Old Reddit. It's a barrage of straightforward white and blue text, a rather unsightly assemblage of lines and squares. It's not trendy.
Maximum line width (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Maximum line width (Score:5, Funny)
POKE 32,10
POKE 33,30
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Re: Maximum line width (Score:2)
Number of digits in UID checks out!
Re: Maximum line width (Score:4, Informative)
I can't help with the modular part, but you can create an account and change your preferences to the old skin [wikipedia.org].
Re: Maximum line width (Score:4, Insightful)
"but you can create an account" Yes, that is probably the purpose of these changes.
Re: Maximum line width (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't help with the modular part, but you can create an account and change your preferences to the old skin [wikipedia.org].
Never in the history of anything IT related has a feature that allowed you to preserve an "old" way of doing or displaying something actually lasted.
First it's opt-in
Then it's opt-out
Then it's f-you stop standing in the way of progress!
Re: Maximum line width (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the best ui change they could make is to kill the stupid begging overlay.
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I think the best ui change they could make is to kill the stupid begging overlay.
Indeed. I would be willing to pay to make it go away, but that doesn't appear to be an option.
Re: Maximum line width (Score:2)
It worked for me. At least for a year or so.
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You forgot the /s
No, I didn't.
I use Wikipedia many times per day and would be willing to pay for a better experience.
But they don't offer that. Even if I donate, I still get the annoyware.
Re: Maximum line width (Score:4, Insightful)
This was an Apple II thing. They're changing the size of the text window. It's surprisingly on-topic.
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all I remember from my C-64 days was the warning in the manual not to go "poking around in BASIC's stack".
Those warnings were fascist bullcrap. No one has the authority to tell you what to do with your own computer. Pokes only change resident RAM. They don't cause any permanent damage.
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There were a few pokes that could damage your computer. I seem to recall some models of PET have one that can toggle a relay controlling the monitor. Enough toggling will wear it out.
Disk drives are another example. Some early ones didn't have a stop to prevent them seeking beyond the limits of the disk, which could damage the heads. Ones with a stop could be trashed by repeatedly ramming the head against it. I seem to recall that was a common failure mode on Commodore drives.
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Pokes only change resident RAM.
They can also change values in memory-mapped hardware. Not everything in every computer's address space is RAM.
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If I wanted to limit the width of a page to half my screen width, I'd make a smaller window.
No you wouldn't. That'd conflict with all the other websites which don't work well with narrower window. You'd end up that each time you Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs, you'd be adjusting the browser window so the page content gets its optimum 50-75 characters per line, and then you'd get so frustrated with this that you'd just give up, and accept that half the pages you view look crummy.
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Shouldn't most websites be responsive these days? I mean, we're well into the mobile era here and it's not really all that difficult.
Let me just check Slashdot real quick to see how they handle things ...
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Shouldn't most websites be responsive these days?
I think "responsive" typically means they set max-width -- so that (1) if they're in a narrow browser window then the text will wrap to the width of the browser, (2) as the browser gets a bit wider then they'll get a bit wider text lines, (3) up to about 50-75 characters per line at which they'll start using whitespace. That's a perfect responsive design, ensures that the text will be optimally readable on whatever width browser you have. And is exactly what wikipedia is changing to...
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Well, what do you think should happen when you change your browser window's width? How do you think that will that affect people with displays that are not the same size as whatever you're using? What about people on mobile?
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If I wanted to limit the width of a page to half my screen width, I'd make a smaller window.
No you wouldn't. That'd conflict with all the other websites which don't work well with narrower window.
My browser lets me have more than one window, each sized independently.
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Hush, don't tell him.
Re: Maximum line width (Score:2)
The vast majority of websites have an improved experience in a small window (or with zoomed text if you prefer). Generally things like sidebars where the ads usually go just disappear or get pushed to the bottom below the content. The whole window focuses on the content you're actually reading.
This is because most web browsing is done on a phone, and the mobile experience tends to be cleaner.
There are certainly exceptions. If you spend your days on Buzzfeed or other clickbait sites, those have terrible expe
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There's a limit to line length and how well your eyes can track what line they are on. This is also why newspapers are in multiple columns. Multiple columns doesn't work that well on the web. I can't say this is all that different than what their site was like before, and I don't see a lot to complain about.
If you have a decently large widescreen, you might as well just set your browser to half the width of the screen. I do this even with two screens.
You could also just zoom the page. It's not so much
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You need to account for font size as well. A good rule is to keep lines under ~40em units.
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They set the font size too. If you want to override the font size these days, it's better to just zoom and let the responsive layout handle it (as long as it's a sane design)
Re: Maximum line width (Score:2)
I prefer 120 chars. 40 is for short form
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If you have a decently large widescreen, you might as well just set your browser to half the width of the screen.
The text area only covers half of that half. 34" screen, 3440x1440. Half of that is 1720 pixels, while Wikipedia's content area is limited to 960 pixels width.
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I have dual 27" 4K. If I ran the OS at 100% zoom, I would be struggling to see anything. And I'm nearsighted. Your pixels are a bit bigger but but not by much
960 pixels is a very specific standard that is admittedly old. It's based around a 1024x768 screen with static scrollbars (though modern browsers overlay and auto hide them). That's not drastically different than the widescreen version at 1366x768 that still seems to be the entry level default for cheap laptops.
I don't think web sites are meant to
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Well, I have resized my browser window to a size where I can comfortably read text across its whole width. It's not maximized, as a matter of fact it's very close to 1920 pixels width (I just checked, out of curiosity). Reading Slashdot at this width (or any website, for that matter) is very nice for me.
My problem with Wikipedia's new design is that it's being forced upon me. I am always against options being removed from users.
Re: Maximum line width (Score:2)
Nothing is being forced on you. This is why user CSS exists.
Re:Maximum line width (Score:5, Informative)
I added this to my userContent.css (for a Firefox variant). It seems to have fixed the pillarboxing issue for now.
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Clicking the button in the bottom right corner didn't work for you?
Re:Maximum line width (Score:4, Interesting)
If I wanted to limit the width of a page to half my screen width, I'd make a smaller window.
Or a narrower viewport.
I've long thought there should be a built-in browser feature to easily adjust the width of a tab's viewport, centering it within the window, without changing the window size. Since window size is a global "setting" that affects all tabs, it's something that should be possible to adjust on a per-tab basis.
There are addons that try and do this, like Too Wide [mozilla.org] and Fixed-Width Annihilator [mozilla.org], but they're hacks around the problem. Firefox's built-in reading mode, which is great in a lot of circumstances, doesn't work well when you don't want the site's visual styles removed.
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So, it will be just like Slashdot then.
More Whitespace (Score:5, Insightful)
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Joy. Can't wait to use yet another website on my widescreen PC monitor that will seemingly cater exclusively to portrait-oriented tablets and phones. I guess I should consider it a blessing that we at least got /. to undo that insane redesign.
That doesn't make sense. I think you have it backwards. If a page is catered to portrait-oriented tablets and phones, then it DOESN'T NEED BOTHER with max-width, since it'll get the optimum 50-75 characters per line already by virtue of the device form factor and browser window size.
It's the websites that are specifically catered to widescreen PCs which need+use max-width for text. That way, when you've got a wide browser window (e.g. because you were watching a landscape video), then you can happily Ctrl+T
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Or I could alt/command tab to another browser window that is the width I want. Even more likely, I'm going to make use of those cute little buttons in the corner of the window to watch that video full screen.
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What nobody wants (well, nobody sane anyway) on a wide screen monitor (which is almost all of us, except the cranky ones who are still using CRTs for some reason) is a website with zero margins that doesn't at least try to format the text as a column.
OK, so I'm not sane. I immediately switched back to the old skin.
Why must people define their personal preferences as some objective universal?
I would rather be able to read more of the article without scrolling down, instead of having so much white space.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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The margins are very very small. What I'm talking about is more of the article fitting on the screen at once.
I switched back to make some more comparisons, and it's even worse than it seemed at first.
User talk, Preferences, and Contributions are now in a separate menu that takes an extra click.
Did they get usability advice from the KDE 4.0 team? This is not what I want.
Re:More Whitespace (Score:5, Insightful)
Your HuffPost article is from 2010. It's about the switch to the skin that is now being switched away from.
The new design leaves a yuuuuge right margin of absolute emptiness, a vast void where there is no text or other content.
It's a good thing it only takes a few minutes to read a Wikipedia article. That business about "guaranteed to cause fatigue" might otherwise be relevant.
Of course, it will take a bit longer with less text before each PgDn.
Oh, well. I'll continue reading Wikipedia articles in HD.
Re: More Whitespace (Score:2)
If every window is full screen, why do you even need windows?
Spot on, Mac and Windows have absolutely terrible window managers. Everyone finds them so difficult, they just maximize everything. Get a better window manager or at least learn to use the one you've selected. Figure out how tiling works. Or expose. Or whatever.
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I should consider it a blessing that we at least got /. to undo that insane redesign.
Mmmm, haven't thought about the Slashdot beta [arstechnica.com] for a long time. The fuckbeta tags (remember when those worked?) on every story were probably my favorite part.
Just tried hitting beta.slashdot.org to see if it still worked, but no joy :(
Oh, no! (Score:5, Insightful)
Fixed width! What a retarded design decision.
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Fixed width! What a retarded design decision.
It's not fixed width (which would be indeed awful); it's maximum width, which is the best of all worlds.
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It's working fine for me in Firefox. I can't find any significant difference between the two, in fact.
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I stand corrected, however it's still stupid. Being able to resize the browser window and adjust text line width was a good feature.
Negatively noticable... or did they not do it yet? (Score:2)
Because I'm looking at Wikipedia and I see no difference while actively looking for one.
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If you're logged in, change the style in your user configuration. As it turns out, I've been viewing Wikipedia on one of their oldest themes, and had no idea they'd updated it.
I know it's not chic here to actually approve of design changes of any sort (by definition, they're always "unnecessary"), but I like the look of the new design.
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I wasn't. A banner shows up saying they've changed things if you are.
But aside from the banner I still don't see substantially different. Maybe a different font? Smaller print and wider line spacing.
The biggest change I see is that instead of the front and center easy to read table of contents they've buried it and shoved it off to the side and formatted it like the content. I'm going to call that a negative. It isn't visible on the page when you load an article on my display, you have to scroll to find the
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Whenever a design is making things "more welcoming," it means "worse."
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Yup. I found one thing they made much worse. It looks like they took the contrasting color table of contents hierarchy and moved it from being front and center, inset into the content off to the left. They dropped the contrast so visually it doesn't stand out from the content and buried below the generic links for the site.
So basically you have to scroll down a ways to get to the first thing you need in any given article and made it so only people who already know it is there will see it. And they buried un
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No, the banner didn't show unless I was logged in. Aside from the racist hate image in the banner and the banner itself I still don't see anything different.
A Good Way To Launder Money (Score:2)
Just tell folks you are doing a major redesign and funnel all that money through employee accounts.
Fixed table of contents is nice (Score:2)
Saves a lot of scrolling, especially on long articles and those types that always have defined "chapters" as it were.
I'll save judgement on other areas but overall seems fine.
Oh, it's noticeable (Score:5, Insightful)
It looks like a fucking blog.
Wikipedia had a near-perfect interface before: clean, but well ordered, with efficient use of margin space for info and links. Now it looks like LiveJournal tried to ape Wikipedia, and kept more LiveJournal in the design.
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It looks like a fucking blog.
It is a fucking blog.
Monobook (Score:2)
If you have an old account, and never changed the theme, you're probably still on Monobook. Tried a logged-out view vs a Monobook view, the difference seems to be just a lot of extra white space, and a slightly different font.
Or "Old" reddit (Score:2)
It's called "maturity" (Score:2)
"It's not trendy." (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not trendy.
And that's as it should be.
It can be restored in the preferences (Score:3)
One can go to the Preference page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and activate the "Vector Legacy (2010)" skin. Of course it requires to be willing to create an account and keep it logged in.
Their option is indeed to make it look like a blog to keep up with the times and improve acceptance by the mass of the readership. Technical people like us who prefer old school skins can create an account.
Re:It can be restored in the preferences (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikipedia is not a blog and tech companies should really stop listening to the mouth breathers bad ideas.
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Technical people like us who prefer old school skins can create an account.
There's nothing "technical" about preferring high characters-per-line. It's just an habit, a local optima. I.e. you got used to it in the past, so it's faster and easier for you now.
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Yeah, because setting a cookie with the chosen skin would have been too intrusive... /s
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You are welcome to submit a patch to mediawiki that implement your wish. Wikipedia keeps in sync with recent releases. Second, a cookie to keep the contents of mediawiki preference page is certainly not solving the concern about tracking.
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As we all know, "keep up with the times" and "improve acceptance by the mass" are absolutely guaranteed to not completely go down the drain in the future.
That is a lie (Score:5, Insightful)
The design needs more work.
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It's a slate article. Everything either it is a lie, or utter incompetence. But nobody will be able to tell which.
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Indeed. "Barely noticeable"? I clicked a link to it (not knowing that the design had changed) and came to the same conclusion. I went up to the URL bar to remove the ".m" only to find it wasn't there.
Because as we know, "Non Profit" doesn't mean... (Score:3)
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Barely noticeable = great (Score:2)
I wish more companies spend years on barely noticeable redesigns instead of changing stuff just to change stuff.
You may or may not like the new redesign. In my opinion, it one of the best "modern" design out there. But out of the good things about that design, that it is "barely noticeable" is undeniably one the best part for me.
Barely noticeable? (Score:2)
My first reaction upon immediately noticing it: "Thanks, I hate it."
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But it is "trendy"? Do you hate progress??
Why is whitespace considered good? (Score:2)
"But it doesn't look all that different than it did 23 years ago, when it was run by a few guys in an office in Florida. The text-heavy website resembles an email inbox, or Craigslist, or Old Reddit. It's a barrage of straightforward white and blue text, a rather unsightly assemblage of lines and squares. It's not trendy."
It is not trendy, no, but it is usable. I know that isn't considered a strong point in "modern" web-design, but usability does have something going for it.
What is the obsession of "trendy"
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The reason is to limit column width. There are lots of studies that show people comprehend more and are fatigued less by reading more narrow columns of text. Newspapers use columns for this same reason. Unfortunately, multiple columns also don't work well with an infinitely scrolling paradigm. So there's a bit of a compromise between the potential max width of the window and a comfortably readable max width of text. This isn't just some trendy web designer shit. They're following scientifically-driven
Re:Why is whitespace considered good? (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly this is a matter of personal preference. Over half of the people who voted on the Wikipedia change voted against it. Most of those specifically opposed the limited width. Your ideas about what looks good are not universal.
I much prefer the first link to the other two. I love the fact that larger horizontal resolution enables longer lines of text. I want to read more and scroll less. I'm not saying your preference is invalid, but mine's just as valid. A lot of us like the longer lines.
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Obviously, there's a fairly large gap between "too long" and "wasting too much whitespace". Look at the first webpage I linked to, and maximize your browser so it fills a full 16x9 ratio, and tell me if you think that's as comfortable to read as a narrower column of text. But should the column be as short as the new Wikipedia default (or the second or third links)? I won't try to answer that one. It's clearly divisive, as many people don't care for it, so maybe they did go too far.
I'm just saying there'
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Look at the first webpage I linked to, and maximize your browser so it fills a full 16x9 ratio, and tell me if you think that's as comfortable to read as a narrower column of text.
More, actually. Didn't I already make that clear? I said, "I much prefer the first link to the other two." Did you assume I was reading it in a small browser window?
That thiing that you feel when you read those long lines, that "discomfort", is evidently not universal. This is my point.
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I have no idea why wasted blank screen space is considered a good thing. I certainly had no trouble reading the old design, which I switched back to after about 5 minutes. (It would have been 10 seconds but I wanted to give the new shite a chance.)
I find that I comprehend more and am fatigued less if I can actually SEE the fucking article more than a few lines at a time without having to scroll. Also, I find the blank space to the left to be distracting and annoying.
The only good thing here, as others ha
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This quote says everyting about modern web-design (Score:2)
"We're going to be able to hear screams from space," I.e., we know nobody actually wants this, but it is "modern" and "trendy" so that is what we're doing. Similar to a lot of "modern" architecture etc: lessons from design school take precedence over user experience.
It's noticeable (Score:2)
It's a noticeable change, but it's not a radical change. I quite like it, especially the table of contents that sticks around on the left-hand site. Makes it much easier to navigate long articles.
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I agree that the sticky table of contents is a somewhat good idea. Everything else is a major step in the wrong direction.
I hate it (Score:5, Insightful)
The new design makes it actively less accessible for people with vision issues. And it's so much brighter than it used to be, which makes it harder to use and more painful on the eyes. I really wish they had just released dark mode for not-logged-in Wikipedia instead, because that's all we really want.
How to get the old skin back ... (Score:2)
If you browse Wikipedia while logged in, then you can get the old 2010 skin back.
Under Preferences -> Appearance, choose "Vector legacy (2010)", then click Save.
Done ...
Anybody knows a place on WIkipedia to protest? (Score:2)
Dreadful (Score:2)
Why can't they just leave a good thing alone?
Slashdot & Wikipedia Have the Same Designers (Score:2)
Slashdot and Wikipedia must have the same web design team. As in, non existent. Aside from making parts of /. Mobile friendly, the experience has remained largely unchanged for as long as I can remember.
It was very noticeable (Score:3)
I didn't find out by reading an article, I found out by looking something up in wiki, and noticing immediately how horribly it wastes space. If I wanted that much white LED light brightening up my room, I would purchase a lamp. Now get off my lawn, you damn kids.
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Top one isn't Vector 2010 it's MonoBook.
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Does it have a dark mode though?
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All systems have faults. Where is the better system? Where is the beta test system showing better results? Are you proposing to refactor the whole society even while most people aren't on board for doing it? How do you tell the difference between systematic oppression due to race or religion or sexuality and systematic oppression due to class or economic status?