Wikipedia’s Redesign Is Barely Noticeable. That’s the Point.
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I mean, I'm old enough to remember when that earlier design was brand-new, and its predecessor was just as iconic, IMO. :P
I don't know if it's just that I'm not used to the new look, but I honestly hate the pillarboxing to fit the new maximum content width.
- When reading an article, I want to have absolutely minimal visual noise. Removing the old sidebar helps.
- The smaller column width helps with readability, because it's easier to scan back to the start of the next line.
- It's great to have the table of contents always visible, to quickly jump around the some of the miles-long articles typical for Wikipedia.
- I don't need anything else on the page - so I don't have any complaints about "inefficient use of space". On the contrary - more whitespace helps me focus on the article.
- Unlike with Wikiwand, there are no distracting animations.
In general, for quite a few things I need extra clicks to get to it.
Also, as I mostly print articles[1], I had a special printing layout set up to print Wikipedia articles. I need to come up with a new layout (reader view for Wikipedia used to be terrible).
[1] https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2021/Dec/consuming-articles-off...
I understand the goal is to limit the line width of articles to make it more comfortable, and I don't disagree with that, but the content feels poorly framed now, just floating in the abyss of 'empty space'. The sticky side nav (which I think is a great idea!) feels unconnected from the article itself.
I think the basis is good, but final execution is lacking. I think with a few relatively minor tweaks it could be even better.
Edit: I think the page looks better with the hamburger menu open, with the different background give the article a bit more structure to sit against.
The top comment from yesterday's HN submission mentions how you can configure Wikipedia (or any MediaWiki) page to use whatever theme you like, including all the previous themes, which are still actively maintained: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34431533
The navigation frame on the left is absolutely massive. At first I thought you linked the mobile view, but no, it really is wasting a quarter of the width of the page (on my monitor) on white space.
Today the only reminder of it (a rather cryptic one) seems to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiSpeak#Typography...
But I think everybody has to create an account, not just us salty grandpas. Like I said, if it was a product goal, it's a sneaky way to do it. Not saying that is the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
> Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn't it?
No, it sounds like running one of the most popular websites on the Internet requires well-paid employees, benefits, and infrastructure investment. 300 employees is two orders of magnitude fewer employees than Microsoft laid off this week. 300 employees to run one of the most trafficked and useful websites ever created is a strikingly small number.
Yes, I want wikipedia to have redundancy. Yes, I want Wikipedia to be resilient against incidents. Yes, I want them to have lawyers to respond to legal issues (both founded and malicious). Yes, I want them to invest in new projects that may or may not pan out into useful services like the ones I already enjoy (it's hard to appreciate how many Wikimedia offers).
If you told me that they spend $100M each year to keep the site online and running well, I'd believe you. A third of that is surprising because it's an astoundingly small number given the sheer amount of value that they create with it, especially for me personally.
Not a single cent goes to the people who actually add value to Wikipedia, i.e. the contributors and admins. They are all volunteers.
The only work that Wikimedia does is keeping the servers on, which is not work for many people, certainly not more than a few.
And if you disagree with that, then where are all the top 1000 websites that are run by "a few" people?
In 2005, Wikipedia ran on $5000 with one employee and over a billion views just fine. People did, in fact, contribute to it despite money not being thrown into mud.
> And if you disagree with that, then where are all the top 1000 websites that are run by "a few" people?
Where are all the static HTTP websites that are ran by dozens of people? At most SaaS companies, keeping the lights on for the HTTP server is the least work you do.
Your view of the world seems strongly distorted by zealous belief in FAANG overstaffing.
It's not static content!
> I've ran moderately popular websites before and it's zero work most of the time.
I run a service that gets ten million requests on a bad day. There's almost always work to be done.
> Where are all the static HTTP websites that are ran by dozens of people?
Most static websites don't allow anyone to sign up for an account and mutate the content.
> At most SaaS companies, keeping the lights on for the HTTP server is the least work you do.
Most SaaS companies aren't serving a multi-terabyte mutable dataset to billions of people a month. They also aren't dealing with tens of millions of pages of user-generated content. Or a huge volume of legal requests because of all of their user-generated content.
> zealous belief in FAANG overstaffing.
Which FAANG company has only 300 employees?
Seriously, 23 billion page views per day. That's like if each of their employees oversaw a service that got 76M page views per day. That's a quarter million page views (not requests!) Per second. Half a billion pages on Wikipedia alone: that's a few million pages per employee.
Just asking for money while you already have money is not inherently lying. You might not like it, but lying involves making untrue statements. "We need your money" is not untrue, even if you already have a lot of money. "We need your money or else we'll shut down" would be untrue, but all of the pitches I've seen don't include anything like that.
New skin, same width: https://ibb.co/PgxF8hf
Old skin, maximum width: https://ibb.co/WsptkCY
New Skin, same width: https://ibb.co/x8NmgZq
It's probably possible to find screen widths at which comparisons favor the old skin, but all I see is improvement. From old to new, minimum or maximum width, more content is visible, and line lengths are more readable. Kudos on the new design.
Long line lengths are objectively bad for readability[0] and information retention[1], even among people who claim to prefer them. That said, I believe long line lengths are faster.
0. https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
1. https://uxmovement.com/content/how-margins-and-line-lengths-...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin...
The cash overhang of the Wikimedia Foundation means that the internal incentives are to overhire, and for those overhired employees to make work for themselves.
Regardless, it is extremely hard to see how they could be providing additional value for their rapidly growing expenditures.
The one most used element for me was the side bar, where I could hover over the language to see the translation of some term. Now it's hidden behind a click, and a looot of scrolling. Just try to reach Svenska.
I can work around the style changes easily with custom CSS and stylus, but I'm not impressed by that change.
"We are currently considering adding single-click functionality for the most-frequently used languages."
Sadly, while that means that the overall experience will be improved, it will solve exactly nothing for those who are unlucky enough to use a less-frequently-used language.
Alternatively, one could create an account and set a default language, or visit a wikipedia site dedicated to that language.
https://en.wikipedia.org vs https://zh.wikipedia.org for example.
Once you've switched, further links within the site should keep you in that language.
You see something different from this? https://ibb.co/pKbgw6w
Are you logged in, perhaps?
This is the first link: https://paste.pics/dca5897542c8fb939608262307aeafed
Many thanks for the query workaround!
- First word says exactly what the article is about: Wikipedia.
- First two words give more precision and the news itself: "Wikipedia's Redesign."
- First sentence communicates it was a minor redesign.
- Second sentence communicates it was intentional, and there will be rationale shared.
This type of headline writing should be expected, but sadly it's the exception.
I've customized it to be just how I like using their settings.
This might look ok on a smaller monitor, but on 4K it is very sparse.
Seems being directly linked to pages doesn't show the new design sometimes if you aren't logged in. But I'll provide the page where they talk about the new theme itself and the expand button [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Antiguan_general_election
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vector_2022#How_to_e...
Either way, I don't have a strong opinion on whether its an improvement or regressive. Pretty much everything nowadays seems to be converging on a narrow column of text.
Navigating is also slow, it takes a second to scroll down, while before it was instantaneous.
https://i.ibb.co/RzNWLjY/before.webp
https://i.ibb.co/B2W3Bt6/after.webp
It *really* doesn't degrade gracefully under a small amount of text scaling. I don't think they fully tested this redesign before deploying it; I don't think my configuration's an obscure edge case.
My complaints:
* Very narrow width for the main article body, where sidebars are present
* Far too large margins; incorrect scaling
* Jarring left/right asymmetry
* Undesirable scrollbars on internal elements (left Table of Contents); hinders navigation
* Space above and below left ToC is wasted and ugly
(To be transparent, I *did* cherry-pick this specific page so that I could show multiple issues in a single picture).
By making text flow to 100% of the width you can easily resize the browser window for everyone's perfect reading width.
I usually run my browser tiled to 50% of the screen, the new design wastes a lot of space at that size (you have to shrink to really narrow width before it enters 'mobile mode' and uses 100% of the width again - I mean it's pretty insane, you can see more text at say 30% width, but at 40%-60% it pops out that useless white space padding on the left leading to a narrower effective text width)
I totally agree with you: I like to use my browser at ~50% of screen width on a 27" screen, so it looks terrible there because of all the wasted space. If they made it work at 50% width like it does at 30% width, I'd have no complaints.