Minimal Wikipedia redesign concept | Hacker News Reader

Minimal Wikipedia redesign concept

wikipedia.moesalih.com

68 pointshaymills50 comments

It's pretty but the lack of borders around boxes makes some articles hard to follow. Look at this for example: http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Hyperbolic_function

There are many people doing redesigns for websites and games, and they usually end up making things prettier while not improving user experience or even making it worse. So my humble request to everyone making these is to try to address the usability issues a site might have, and don't concentrate too much on the superficial look of the site.

That!

IDK, I think people tend to ignore the virtues of Wikipedia's design. It's actually really well thought out. It may not be pretty, or hip, but as far as utility goes it's hard to find a site that can beat it.

Think about how people use Wikipedia: scanning for one specific bit of information. Normal users see 90% of the information on the page as un-useful, why should meta info matter.

Overall, I think their biggest virtue is consistency, even though it's changed over the years, a user generally knows where to find what she's looking for. That's the purpose of good design, is it not?

Disables zoom (iOS, Chrome).

Why do people do this? They are, even if they don't realize it, yelling "FUCK YOU" to people like me.

I hope I'm not hijacking this thread in any way by posting a link to my Wikipedia redesign attempt. It's not actual code - just a visual mock-up. I posted it a while ago to Hacker News but would love to hear feedback

http://www.interfacesketch.com/wikipedia/

This is by far better approach yes (and as you say on your page, really its all just a bit of tweaking, not a technical redesign); Wikipedia's content is, IMHO, way too rich to thrive with the minimalist/huge-blog-font combo in OP's link.

Thanks. I think the structure and organisation of articles on Wikipedia is pretty sound, but some visual tweaks can help make the page more easily scannable and a litte bit more aesthetically pleasing (which I realise is a very subjective thing!)

Wow. I know it's a purely personal taste thing, but I think your redesign is leagues ahead of OP's proposal. Your design keeps the informative, interconnected aspect of Wikipedia's design and then cleans it up slightly and makes it more readable, but does so in a way that won't alienate the average user.

I might actually see if I can find the time to code up a preview of your design and see how it handles 'in the wild', as such.

Thanks very much! I wanted to keep all the existing features of an article page rather than eliminate anything. I think it's possible to do this while making the page feel a little less busy and cluttered.

This is much better. It actually fits the purpose of the site.

I will just leave this here, since a lot of the comments are basically echoing Wikipedia's official stance on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesigns

The large font looks ridiculous, why do you people keep doing that? If I needed bigger letters on my screen I'd adjust the DPI on my display.

I think the idea behind the bigger font sizes is that the space between your head and the screen is typically greater than that between and a book you're reading. I would agree that this takes a bit far, but it may look nice on a mobile device.

I'm going to have to second this. Why waste all of this screen real estate? I zoomed it out to 67% on Chrome to make it look normal. Definitely one of my biggest pet peeves about modern web UI.

From the "about" page[0]:

But it deserves a better and more delightful design. This is my vision of how the reading experience should be like. Better typography, removed side bar, reduced clutter, improved contrast and clarity, and more open space.

By removing these useful elements, it's actually made the general experience of a web site worse. These things are needed in one form or another to make a website usable as a site and not just a page.

[0]: http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/?about

As with every other Wikipedia redesign proposal, linking to J. Thomas's Wikipedia Redesign post is necessary:

http://jgthms.com/wikipedia-redesign.html

Nice. This should be a required reading for every "vision"-happy hipster designer out there:

It works for me, in my context, on my screen, it should be fine, right? Well, that's not designing. That's cheating. You're skewing the content's use, perverting its value.

This point is worth repeating: design without a purpose is not design; it's onanism. Anyone can go spend a weekend playing with photoshop for hours to give free rein to their own "vision" and aesthetic prejudices, given enough familiarity with the tool --in a way, not too different from shopping or 'pimping' a car or what not. But an altogether different challenge is to design for users, the vast majority of whom one will likely never even meet. And that requires at the very least some empathy for the poor victims stuck with one's shitty and arbitrary design choices long after one has moved on check in hand --like disabling zoom, hello!?!??.

So when the OP glibly says in their manifesto[1]:

"I love Wikipedia. It's awesome. But it deserves a better and more delightful design. This is my vision of how the reading experience should be like. Better typography, removed side bar, reduced clutter, improved contrast and clarity, and more open space."

I would respond:

1. Ok, but try first put yourself in the shoes the hundreds of millions of users who rely on wikipedia every day and their whole spectrum of use cases, environments and needs; then

2. try locate the totality of your own experience within that spectrum; and then

3. ask yourself to what extent your prior notions of delight, clarity, typographic beauty, etc might be highly conditioned by the peculiarities of your own experience and environment; and

4. to what extent such acquired "good design" intuitions are really the kind of self-evident, plausibly generalizable ground truths about usability and human interaction you feel it's worth pontificating about.

[1] http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/?about

again?!

This is wikipedia mobile with a new typo isn't it?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_news

In terms of readability, I actually much rather prefer this one.

I like OP's typography better in most respects, but the mobile site's line length is far more manageable.

Ah for Jesus sake. At least his font is kind of nice. Would bump that body copy up to font-weight:400 however.

Looks much better, and the wiki editor is great too to make quick changes on mobile.

Wikipedia redesigns are becoming the new Hello World.

Why not? ,Wikipedia basic theme is not very good anyway,too much un-usefull meta informations,tiny text,barely readable sans serif font... a lot can be done to make the whole thing more readable/usable,the OP redesign is clean an minimal.That's what Wikipedia needs.

True... but this one actually implements the design, as opposed to the photoshop mockups I normally see on some designer's blog

The side bar on the full site provides useful links like citation and language selection, as well as basic navigation.

How do I do that here?

So, how am I supposed to select language?

No, not another follower of "things are difficult, let's make them simple, modern and nice" camp. Will people learn that removing stuff from the product doesn't make it simple, but simplistic? Removing features (changing languages, wikimedia/wikiquote links) is not an improvement.

Sure, the font typeface is nice, and much better than original but that's about it.

Why is the text so damn huge? I know how to use zoom, thank you very much. Actually, you even broke that - take a look at timeline image of http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Hanibal - the picture text is a tiny compared to the gigantic text - I can zoom in, but then the text becomes even bigger.

A lot of whitespace and removing virtually all the colors makes the page look very sterile. Remove scrollbar, make the links indistinguishable from text and you have a Metro/Modern(R)(TM) app. I still wonder how much brain damage the designer of that style suffers from...

No visited link indication? Is that meant to be some kind of a joke?

Obviously in some designers' minds (including yours) cleaner = better. But it's not! Wikipedia is not the award-winning oh-my-god-it-looks-so-nice page. No it's very very functional and easy to read. All those vertical lines, boxes and bars add structure and visual cues to the text and make it much easier to read. Thank you for taking it away.

No offense, but this creation is horrible.

A copy of an email I sent to the designer, “A few notes about your Wikipedia redesign”:

> … custom formatting on some wikipedia pages might not look right. If you see anything like that, let me know.

The formatting of highlighted code examples is not right. Sometimes there is extra indentation at the beginning, and the syntax highlighting is always missing. For example, compare [your Ruby (programming language) – examples](http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Ruby_%28programming_language%2...) to [Wikipedia’s Ruby (programming language) – examples](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_%28programming_language%29...). Also, the code example `puts"Give me a number"` is missing a space compared to Wikipedia’s version.

There is too big a difference between the font sizes of normal text and of code blocks. In the site, code blocks are at a readable font size while main text is overly big, and when I zoom out to 80% to make the main text more comfortable, code block text is now too small. Picture captions and infoboxes also have this problem, to a lesser extent.

On [the about page](http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/?about), “email me” should be a link to “mailto:moe.salih@gmail.com”, so we don’t have to go to your personal website and find the link in the footer.

Why is the font so large?

All browsers have the ability to configure the font to whatever the user desires. Why does this site override the user's preferences, and make the body text larger?

That was my first thought. It might look pretty, but Wikipedia is mostly a text website, this would require way too much scrolling.

Personally I don't think it improves on the usability and I find the font too large, meaning that I feel like I have minor tunnel vision compared to normal Wikipedia.

The only part of normal Wikipedia pages that I normally never touch is the sidebar with the different languages. I don't think I hardly ever click on anything there. It would make sense for my usage at least for the sidebar to be hidden by default.

I actually like the redesign, it is cleaner and less distracting when I read. It does need some edge cases handled though. For instance, look at Russia's flag: http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Russia vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia

Or this: http://imgur.com/JdfnF7a

I think that the edit button is an important part of wikipedia.

Maybe some kind of menu button could be added near the search bar with the edit, history and talk links.

This is a really interesting approach - and I concur w/ elsen - it's not that far from wikipedia's current mobile implementation [1]

Last summer, I build a couple of MediaWiki skins; one based on Zurb's Foundation [2] and one based on Yahoo's Pure [3]

Both of these projects showed me many of the non-obvious challenges in redesigning Wikipedia; tabs, tables, and editor come to mind immediately. Cascading a new look&feel down to common (and uncommon) extensions is, of course, it's own level of effort.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page 2. http://foreground.thingelstad.com/wiki/Main_Page 3. http://filament.thingelstad.com/wiki/Main_Page

This would work well as a userstyle for Wikipedia if it were available. The type is far too large though, I needed to zoom out about 50% for comfort.

Compare a featured article seen on the front page in the mobile version of Wikipedia [1], with this site's style [2]. The mobile version keeps the text smaller and narrower, making for easier desktop reading. There ultimately isn't much this new style improves upon though.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Joy

[2] http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Cyclone_Joy

I do like clean minimalism, but I'm not sure it works on a site like Wikipedia. The NYTimes recent redesign was a pretty good meld of minimalism around the article but retaining functionality.

I fear that your design kind of strips away a whole ton of functionality and with something like Wikipedia functionality is infinitely more important than design.

Kudos on actually coding up a completely working live preview though. That's not something I see too often with these kinds of proposals.

I prefer the current wikipedia.

I prefer this redesign http://wikipedia.gkvasnikov.com

That's just a bunch of images. The linked page actually works.

Typography is good, but text with lots of links in it is difficult to read: the low weight font and the blue color doesn't work on the pure-white background. Maybe slightly darker color for links or a little bolder?

There are still some rough edges, but definitely one of the best redesigns I have seen.

+ large, beautiful readable fonts

+ Search bar is a search bar and easy to find

+ unnecessary borders removed

- Could use a little bit more branding

- No change-language feature

- Zoom disabled on mobile devices

- Some elements needs size tuning

For the contents outline, some kind of bullet or symbol would be nice to indicate different levels and each heading.

Actually looks really good.

But... why are you leaking my information to facebook, twitter, yandex.ru and google analytics?

how about wikipedia allows multiple style sheets and lets us each choose what we like. One size does not fit all.

Breaks infoboxes.

So clean

"minimalist"

>_<'

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