Building a more robust Wikipedia interface by spotting the differences (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Building a more robust Wikipedia interface by spotting the differences (2023)

nray.dev

23 pointsgofiggy10 comments

> The previous skin, Vector, had been the default look on Wikipedia for 12 years. It was time for a better desktop experience.

So, when is the better desktop experience coming?

I kid, I kid. Well, kind of. There are features of Vector2022 I really like, and wish was part of classic Vector, like the search bar. I still can’t get used to the LHS table of contents.

Ironically Vector2022 has a much improved mobile experience compared to mobile-first themes like Minerva. It’s nice to have a fully-supported responsive theme.

Is Pixel going to be available in Gerrit?

Yeah, I had to create a user on many language versions just to keep the old skin. I fail to see a point in wasting 2/3 of my screen estate to whitespace.

I'm in the same boat. I think it's unfortunate that MediaWiki doesn't accept a theme header or cookie, which would be very easy to set with extensions. User sessions don't persist for very long and don't work in private browsing mode, while the querysring useskin= parameter is annoying to work with and isn't applied to hyperlinks.

People creating an account just to browse isn’t great for the WMF either. You don’t get the pages cached by Varnish and hit the Mediawiki servers directly. There’s still parser cache, but it’s still more load while logged in.

I mean, a header/cookie just for skin would probably have the same issue, cache would have to be split or it would have to cause (varnish) cache to be skipped. Something people aren't going to be eager for if its a large number of users.

Depending on where you are connecting from this is also a latency increase since you are no longer hitting geo-located servers.

We could go the Reddit route and have monobook.en.wikipedia.org

In theory user sessions are supposed to persist for a year, although it seems there have been issues recently.

The problem with unbounded page width is that the content often didn't work well that wide. I use a 1440p monitor and on the old theme, paragraphs were often a bit too wide to read comfortably. As a Wikipedia editor, it was also very often a challenge when writing articles – it's difficult to make your placement of images and tables and so forth look decent on viewports anywhere from ~400px to >2000px wide.

All that said, the new theme does allow you to return to wide mode -- on any page on the site, there's an Appearance options panel in the rightmost column where you can switch from Standard to Wide.

"It's old, so we must change it" is a mindset that lacks something. Specifically, it lacks "because we have better ideas now and the old version has become inadequate for practical tasks". I wish designers would stop putting me through experiences.

At the foot of the page is a link to "The new Wikipedia appearance that took the whole village", with a boast about "We worked effectively with our editing community". Well, the technical improvements are fine, nobody minds if search works better. But regarding the look and feel of the skin, the way I remember it is, they did a trial rollout and consulted the unwashed masses of editors on lengthy talk page threads, and about half of us outright hated it, and they ignored us and only "worked with" positive people suggesting minor tweaks, because at that point it was a fait accompli and WMF was paying them to design stuff and they were damn well going to, whether we didn't like it.

I mean, if you think that's bad you should have seen how original vector went down.

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