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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The heavily-graphical "grid" front page assumes that the best Wikipedia articles have curated, attractive graphics to place in the grid. As a rule, they do not. Wikipedia is a volunteer project, and there are no editors or in-house designers to keep articles fashionably decked out. Not only that, but Wikipedia is at a disadvantage w/r/t/ graphics: the site tries to be scrupulous about copyrights, and can't appropriate random images or, for that matter, pay licensing fees for them.

Similarly, some of the layouts of the tiles in the front-page grid appear to have carefully chosen typography. Who's doing that work?

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They may not, but I fail to see how that is "as a rule". One of the requirements of featured articles is that they contain media.[1] The review process and competition for main page nomination seems likely to ensure they are at least decent quality.

If you dig around, I also think you'd be surprised how many high quality images Wikipedia and Wikimedia have. There is a Featured Picture[2] process that encourages and curates great images.

Wikipedia basically invented crowd sourcing -- I'm sure editors could handle custom placement, even if it doesn't turn out as perfect as a hired designer would do it.

Overall I can't imagine this is a major problem with this design, even if it doesn't always look as flashy as the mockups.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_crit...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_pictures

And yet, moving to a design that highlights a 'main graphic', or bit of hand-crafted typography, could actually prompt that volunteer work when people notice it's missing.

Do you design for the worst-case, where you're lucky to get a little attention from overworked volunteers working outside their areas of competence? Or for a more hopeful case, where any gaps in the design will signal an opportunity for eager, precocious volunteers to do more?

I believe Wikipedia has had good success in the past with campaigns to fill in CC-licensed rich media, especially volunteer photographs, where they've been missing.

This misses some of the point of the front page. "Featured Article" (FA) status is one of the most important incentive schemes on the site. It's a case where what's good for the front page is also good for the community. There's nothing intrinsically good about having a nifty icon for a story, and not every contributor working to lift some obscure article to FA status is going to have that resource available.

You raise a really good point. Any design has costs: resource costs, labor costs, technology costs. Like most redesigns, this one focuses on the visuals without any consideration of costs. For volunteer-based organization like Wikipedia, costs are particularly important. Granted, cost estimation is a notoriously difficult problem, but it at least needs to be considered.

The whole redesign seems to deeply misunderstand how Wikipedia is put together and how it is used. I don't love the current design but, like Craigslist, it better suits the asset. Many think Wikipedia, Craigslist, et al, are successful despite the "lousy" design. I would say "because".

There's also something to be said for timelessness. Not everything in this redesign is on-trend or dates itself, but the front-page grid design would be just as at home on Slate or Vox. Wikipedia is going to exist 50 years from now. It's likely that gridded-out magazine cover pages won't.

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