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Comment by rplnt | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking just yesterday whether wikipedia will ever change its design or if it is timeless (unless devices change radically). I don't remember any major changes, I guess there were gradual that I didn't notice?

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There have been design changes. The most noticeable one happened in 2010.[1]

[1]: http://www.technorms.com/326/the-new-wikipedia-wikimedia-fou...

In my entirely unqualified opinion, that's a very well done redesign; it looks the same, only better.

As a reader I prefer the older design, so I was glad that they allowed me to keep using that. Other websites always force you to switch.

They have an m. subdomain that's a bit cleaner, visually:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_...

versus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...

The m. subdomain is for mobile devices, to make thing look chrisper on mobile phones. You can see at the bottom of page, there's an option to switch between mobile and desktop view.

However we can use this to read on desktop too.

The design evolves, just very carefully. There were typography tweaks in 2014: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh (mostly increasing the font size of the main page text and changing headings to use a serif font).

The logo has also changed quite a bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_logos

The one of the recent iteration removed the symbol from the Klingon alphabet to be replaced by a Geʿez character, along with other changes.

Have you used wikiwand? Much improved UX. Can't go back since I started using it.

My friend swears by Wikiwand, but I hate how it changes all links to its own domain. (It really should have been a browser extension instead of its own website that's merely a stylesheet) It also overoptimizes for the reader: minimizing the edit tab, hiding the talk page, hiding the history tab, over-enlarging images, and making disambiguation hatnotes nearly invisible. I do like how it has article preview popups on hover, though Wikipedia has had that feature in beta for a while. This blog post sums up the objection to redesigns well: http://jgthms.com/wikipedia-redesign.html

I'm not sure that blog post is really applicable. It's shunning the idea of using designer tools to generate mockups of Wikipedia which focus on eye candy at the expense of content. That's not really what's going on with Wikiwand.

I think it is applicable in how it brings up how these redesigns focus on aesthetics at the expense of information. Wikiwand puts aside what it doesn't think is important, but if they had talked to anyone who actually uses Wikipedia they would learn otherwise. For example, look how much prominence it gives to images. While these are aesthetically pleasing, they reduce the information density and give the images more prominence than the actual content. I also bought up how it hides so much important parts of an article. How is a reader/editor supposed to bring up their concerns if they don't clearly know that there is a talk page? What if they felt that the article suddenly changed drastically and wanted to view the article history? What if they landed on the wrong article and can't see the hatnotes that usually tell them about the article they likely wanted? The blog post has this to say:

> Why Wikipedia? Because you often stumbled upon it and thought “Urgh, it’s so ugly!”? If so, you weren’t using it. You were looking at it.

and I think it rings quite true.

Except Wikiwand isn't a Wikipedia redesign. It's explicitly a Wikipedia reader, and even advertises itself in that way.

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