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.
I agree with the spirit of the article, and would like to add that the thing that bugs me about these Wikipedia re-designs is that none of these designers seem to know that it's quite easy to add your own CSS and restyle Wikipedia.
I've been rocking my own Wikipedia theme for over a year now:
Agreed. Wikipedia doesn't need a redesign, it's fine as it is. I have some issues with its markup language, but other than that, it's easy to use for reading and editing.
Wikipedia: please don't change. I'm not sold on the cult of Newer Is Better.
You'd probably want any redesign of Wikipedia to start with the understanding that the front page of the English Wikipedia isn't WWW.WIKIPEDIA.ORG, it's EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG, and that that page is dominated by content --- most notably the WP Featured Articles, which are a core part of the Wikipedia community.
Draw the pretty colored lines after you grok the concept.
It goes downhill for me as they try to get more technical, redefining the way the encyclopedia is edited and organized. Drag and drop reformatting of article layouts? Really? Don't the best Wikipedia articles tend to be conformant to template layouts?
Wikipedia is not Digg. It does not have, as its primary goal, the delight of random web users. They are doing something bigger than that.
I'm also not a fan of the branding idea. First, they've confused Wikipedia with The Wikimedia Foundation. The two aren't the same thing. The branding they propose makes sense only for the latter. Second, they're trying to do that organic living logo thing that has become ultra-trendy lately (just read Brand New Blog to see it done well); "as Wikimedia evolves, the little lines in the logo will change". Well, maybe, but the relationship between Wikimedia top-level properties doesn't change all that regularly, nor does it meaningfully change depending on the context. Nor does the aggregate set of lines between properties draw an appealing or meaningful picture.
Also the capital "I" in the font they're using is killing me.
I think it's doing Wikipedia a disservice to say that it looks good because it's "minimalist" or "static content". There has obviously been a lot of work put into making Wikipedia work well in every browser.
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.
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.
I agree strongly with this message. There is a lot more to web design than making a page "pretty".
Wikipedias design is good; and certainly too good to justify a complete design overhaul.
The biggest problem I have with it is the unclear visual hierarchy: there are links which are context dependent (changes depending on which article you're viewing) next to links which always link to the same page.
And the list of languages the article is available in would benefit from listing the most viewed (or last used) versions before the full alphabetical listing.
While there might be a lot of current users who feel like “if it’s not broke why fit it?”, there are a lot of whys it can be improved (some previous commenters have already linked some great research to how line length improves readability). As someone who is very dyslexic, I can say that Wikipedia is incredibly difficult to read, navigate and use effectively as a resource. It is not organized in a way that is easy to parse, the content blocks are huge making it extremely difficult to read, and there is very little white space. I’m excited to see how they revamp the UI/UX to make it more user friendly.
Every Wikipedia "redesigns" miss the essence of Wikipedia. Of course a better reading experience is desirable. But the goal of Wikipedia is to allow people to share their knowledge by contributing. If a redesign fails to address both sides of the experience, it is probably not a good redesign.
I'm not sure Wikipedia needs a rebranding, and tell me if I'm the only one, but I use Google to get to specific Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia's actual search and search results need to be re-implemented, but I don't agree about redesign beyond that.
That leaves the actual articles. I like the way they are designed here, except for the monolithic nav bar.
If anything, this is a nice theme for articles - and theming is a feature that has existed on Wikipedia for a number of years now.
Every now and then a designer comes along and says they're going to fix Wikipedia. And those of us who've tried either are polite or roll our eyes....
However, this person has some legitimately great ideas. I love how the design is far more reader-centric. I'm not sure why I need a history of articles that I read (browsers do that very well these days), but the 'highlighted' text is a cool idea. You can start thinking about the site as helping you research things, keep a scrapbook of snippets. I love it.
The front page redesign: believe it or not, the multiple languages are the most important thing to highlight. Wikipedia's global audience often uses that system to navigate between encyclopedias. They also often use Google to find the English article, and then look for an 'inter-wiki link' in the margin to an article in their native language.
It looks like there's a lot of cruft in the design, and maybe someone needs to be very bold and piss off a lot of users and force a new interaction pattern. But this stuff is all there for a reason. The 'random article' button is actually one of the most popular features. Really!
As for the proposed branding: first of all, the ideas presented here are not very good. It reminds me of the generic brands at the supermarket. The gossamer rainbow graph wouldn't even reproduce properly at small sizes (and if projects are added or eliminated, then what, do we change the logo?)
But more importantly - the thing which the designers rarely understand is that Wikipedia and its sister projects are not products to be sold - they are communities. And they came to consensus on those logos. They're more like sports team logos than a unified branding system to sell something. That said, there is a system, of sorts; when new logos are made, they try to make variations on the red dot and blue and green shapes.
Also, don't get me started on making color meaningful for navigation. It works for subway maps and it sucks everywhere else. Very bad for accessibility (color-blind people). And very bad for maintainability. The Russian Wikipedia is currently the fastest growing site; you can expect it to change position in the rankings soon. Then what, add another color? Should it change colors, surprising the user? Swap the colors in the rainbow?
Lastly, this designer isn't even addressing the biggest problem we have today, which is how to modify Wikipedia for the mobile web. Reading articles is getting better, and we've been using the Wiki Loves Monuments annual contest as a way to drive the development of mobile photo submissions. But there's still no clear vision of how anyone does serious editing on a mobile device.
As for the part where they offhandedly remark that we should make the site live-editable... HA HA HA. You have no idea what you're up against. I worked on this myself for a while. We made some interesting demos but they weren't something you could deploy.
If we were making Wikipedia from scratch today, of course we'd do that and more, but the thing is, there are multiple challenges, and a whole lot of legacy to support.
Technically: it has to serialize to wikitext and be uploaded as discrete changes to sections. So if you want live editing you need bidirectional parsing and serialization in the browser. Wikitext is unlike any other regular language and has a complex macro system, which consists of... other wiki pages. Stored in the database. Which means you need heavy database I/O just to render HTML. Or at least, a very extensive cache of page fragments. You also can't cheat with a simpler parser in the browser, because wikitext was basically designed to indulge whatever shortcuts the community wanted, and be extremely forgiving. Most wiki pages exploit at least one of the weird quirks. You can't even cheat by regularizing wikitext as you go, because then you're causing spurious changes that the community can't easily police. The current team is solving this with a radical approach to parsing that leverages HTML5's standards and a Node.JS based system. So eventually the parser on the site and in the editor might be very similar.
Operationally: Wikipedia is a cheap site to run because it's basically a static site that you can serve from cache. But changing an article can be monstrously inefficient. There are some articles, like "Barack Obama", that would take minutes to re-render if the caches were empty. When you start changing the basic database model to be more 'live', the costs start to explode.
But rather than drown in negativity, let me just say that whoever this is - thank you for throwing your ideas out there. Assuming this isn't just a resume-building exercise, get in touch with the MediaWiki developers. They need designers.
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.
Apps feel so 2008 ;) I was slightly interested until I realised that this project is an iOS app, not a web page. Isn't one of Wikipedia's most powerful ideas to make knowledge available to everyone? Other then that, yeah, the least thing Wikipedia needs is a hipster redesign.
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