When you go from reading the Atlantic, The Economist, The Washington Post... any content site... then begin to read a Wikipedia entry everything you know about reading an article no longer applies. You are now forced to change what you do.
This is just the most basic no no in web design - unplanned interactions, forcing a user to interact, forcing a user to actually think about the interface.
The developers have just forced every person who wants to consume content on Wikipedia to do it differently than on every other content site.
And there are literally countless millions of people who will have no idea how to disable it, who use computers every day but have no idea how to change something.
> much of the wide range of functionality on the site can feel overwhelming and difficult to understand ... we need to provide not only excellent content and an experience that is engaging and easy to use, but also an experience that is on-par with their perceptions of a modern, trustworthy, and welcoming site
MediaWiki's difficulty of use is the primary reason Wikipedia has fared as well as it has during the decline of substantitve online discourse in recent years.
Wikipedia is far from perfect, but it is the best and last of the old web. Putting people who don't understand this in charge of its redesign is a recipe for disaster.
Wikipedia is one of the few initiatives where not being satisfied with 99% accessibility is absolutely warranted. If your goal is to dethrone it, you have to bite that bullet.
Like other comments have noted, that's not what the article is complaining about.
In the context of this article, Wikipedia's design is analogous to the existing MDN site. I think Wikipedia is a website other websites should seek to emulate, because it loads quickly on all devices and connections I've had. Instead many text based, informational sites are going shifting to SPAs or similar JS reliant architectures.
All of these Wikipedia browsers miss a very important point: A web page is not a book. Wikipedia "pages" already suffer from skeuomorphism: the presentation of data reflects offline materials to the point where the online functionality is compromised. "Pages", "articles", "page turning", lists of "references" are not well-suited for the web. More about Wikipedia's UX issues here: http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/
The thing I am most astonished is that Wikipedia is even a thing that requires no login, no special app, no annoying popups (except the occasional jimmy wales donation banner). It’s open. It’s fast. It’s comprehensive. You can freely download a dump .
Reddit, quora, yelp, facebook on the other hand are Plagued with dark patterns that give a middle finger to the user.
It makes me wonder the kind of shit we build in the name of “user experience”. What is wrong with our industry?
I'm not communicating well. I'm saying, "sure, Wikipedia's UX is clunky, but it obviously does work".
You should read downthread; other people have taken a closer look at Danny Sullivan's real experience working with Wikipedia's processes. This isn't a good case study to make a stand on. Give it a few weeks; Wikipedia will inevitably do something genuinely dumb we can get outraged about. It appears not to have here.
>Craiglist presentation hasn't changed either. I don't think this point is relevant if the UI is good enough or have been this way for so long that people are used to it. Changing it would be weird.
There are many problems with Wikipedia's presentation of information [1], but the point is that, even if Wikipedia's UI was the best there was, new media inevitably come along that change the way customers want to access their information. For example, you may think it's 'weird' to change Wikipedia's text-heavy UI, but kids brought up on Snapchat, WhatsApp and Instagram might want a more visual interface for their encyclopedia.
>You want to innovate an online encyclopedia? How exactly do you do that? And without sacrificing integrity?
Beyond UI, Wikipedia has many problems in its data structure, policies, and integrity, by which I mean the veracity of its information, and its endemic bias. Rather than discuss them here, please read my blog post: Wikipedia's 13 deadly Sins. [1]
>What is this time to event thing that you speak of?
The rapid collapse of an incumbent site due to its monopoly position and consequent lack of innovation i.e. the point of the original post.
Your response appears to confirm that the lack of imagination that goes hand-in-hand with monopoly products is not just confined to their creators. Their customers want the monopoly, until they don't. Wikipedia, Craigslist, Google and Facebook are not unassailable. Everything dies.
Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world. It hasn’t been changed or redefined during the last 10 years. The web and its technologies has developed further and so have its users.
And why should it be changed? Wikipedia's design is one of the prime examples of "simple, clean, effective", in my mind.
Frankly, the only good idea I see here is an integrated WYSIWYG wiki markup editor. That might work, although MediaWiki markup isn't that hard to get acquainted to, and it's probably a good thing that someone should spend a bit of time to do so before making major edits.
Otherwise, this looks like some misguided attempt to make Wikipedia look more like Medium, as ostensibly Medium is the future of UX. Magpies hopping on to the newest trend, as always. Web design is notorious for this.
The front page is an overly cluttered dashboard that makes Wikipedia look like a blog, more than anything else. Unnecessary, and quite constrained.
Article pages have been turned into trailing, centered sprawls of text. Works for blogs, but not for an online encyclopedia. The present design is more suited to Wikipedia's features as a web project.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Wikipedia's font responsive and dynamic? It adapts to whatever typeface is the default on your browser.
This. Show me the code, or at least a github with the beginnings of making these ideas a reality, or you're wasting my time with mental masturbation. Until you can actually test these dramatic changes with real users and show that these changes can be achieved in a usable way, it's the height of designer hubris to trot this out as a major improvement to one of the world's most popular sites. Say whatever you will of WikiPedia, the reality is that 99.9% of designers will never build anything as useful to so many people in their entire career. That is a design success.
So, while these "redesign famous site" projects are fun, I guess, and probably great practice and thinking exercises for the designers, I don't think the folks behind a site like Wikipedia ought to drop everything and follow their advice. Wikipedia has billions of pages to serve, and millions of people to educate.
I don't use Wikipedia any more, they wouldn't leave me alone with their constant begging. I could just set up a block for the things, but I'd rather just be edgy and never use the site again. The content has been going downhill for years anyway. A lot more fun to find specific resources on cooler websites.
I hate to have to point this out but we nerds no longer have the internet to ourselves, they let the rest of the world in and for good or bad, not everyone knows the rules; that's not their problem, that's Wikipedias unless we want the community to wither and die.
Wikipedia's supposed to be open to all and there's nothing that says an expert (in some obscure field we have no knowledge of) is also going to have the same understanding and experience of online communities as us.
It's nothing to do with UI/UX bias and more to do with looking at the processes we currently have from the perspective of someone who isn't us and doesn't have the same knowledge/understanding we do.
Wikipedia at the moment presents it's self as one thing 'an encyclopedia anyone can edit' but attempting to do so can be a daunting and labyrinthine process that does put people off. We're not practicing what we preach.
TL;DR - Go easier on the N00Bs and build a better FAQ.
Yes! As soon as wikipedia stopped being the first result for nearly everything it started going downhill. The decline in usability for me has been most notable in the last 5 years.
I don't think this is a good idea. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that many people depend on all over the world. Encyclopedias should not just switch off for political reasons. Books don't turn off. Digital information should not turn on and off either for any reason. A big red banner covering half the page can get the message across without actually making us unable to access the information stored in wikipedia.
Reminds me of when archive.org "improved" their site with javascript a year or two back and it stopped working entirely if you don't run JS and don't use a modern commercial browser.
They can say whatever they want about how this won't happen but likely it's not up to them (because it's a corporation and because they won't control the decisions of the JS framework they pick). Wikipedia isn't broken. Fixing it is bad.
I'm all for improving the functionality of Wikipedia (e.g., the visual editor and Flow), but I'm very much against changing the look of the site. Wikipedia's layout is simple and puts focus on the content instead of the design.
When you go from reading the Atlantic, The Economist, The Washington Post... any content site... then begin to read a Wikipedia entry everything you know about reading an article no longer applies. You are now forced to change what you do.
This is just the most basic no no in web design - unplanned interactions, forcing a user to interact, forcing a user to actually think about the interface.
The developers have just forced every person who wants to consume content on Wikipedia to do it differently than on every other content site.
And there are literally countless millions of people who will have no idea how to disable it, who use computers every day but have no idea how to change something.
Just an incredible UX failure.
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