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My friend swears by Wikiwand, but I hate how it changes all links to its own domain. (It really should have been a browser extension instead of its own website

My friend swears by Wikiwand, but I hate how it changes all links to its own domain. (It really should have been a browser extension instead of its own website that's merely a stylesheet) It also overoptimizes for the reader: minimizing the edit tab, hiding the talk page, hiding the history tab, over-enlarging images, and making disambiguation hatnotes nearly invisible. I do like how it has article preview popups on hover, though Wikipedia has had that feature in beta for a while. This blog post sums up the objection to redesigns well: http://jgthms.com/wikipedia-redesign.html http://jgthms.com/wikipedia-redesign.html

edgyswingset 11y ago
I'm not sure that blog post is really applicable. It's shunning the idea of using designer tools to generate mockups of Wikipedia which focus on eye candy at the expense of content. That's not really what's going on with Wikiwand.
- cooper12 11y ago
  I think it is applicable in how it brings up how these redesigns focus on aesthetics at the expense of information. Wikiwand puts aside what it doesn't think is important, but if they had talked to anyone who actually uses Wikipedia they would learn otherwise. For example, look how much prominence it gives to images. While these are aesthetically pleasing, they reduce the information density and give the images more prominence than the actual content. I also bought up how it hides so much important parts of an article. How is a reader/editor supposed to bring up their concerns if they don't clearly know that there is a talk page? What if they felt that the article suddenly changed drastically and wanted to view the article history? What if they landed on the wrong article and can't see the hatnotes that usually tell them about the article they likely wanted? The blog post has this to say: > Why Wikipedia? Because you often stumbled upon it and thought “Urgh, it’s so ugly!”? If so, you weren’t using it. You were looking at it. and I think it rings quite true.
  - edgyswingset 11y ago
    Except Wikiwand isn't a Wikipedia redesign. It's explicitly a Wikipedia reader, and even advertises itself in that way.

edgyswingset 11y ago

I'm not sure that blog post is really applicable. It's shunning the idea of using designer tools to generate mockups of Wikipedia which focus on eye candy at the expense of content. That's not really what's going on with Wikiwand.

cooper12 11y ago
I think it is applicable in how it brings up how these redesigns focus on aesthetics at the expense of information. Wikiwand puts aside what it doesn't think is important, but if they had talked to anyone who actually uses Wikipedia they would learn otherwise. For example, look how much prominence it gives to images. While these are aesthetically pleasing, they reduce the information density and give the images more prominence than the actual content. I also bought up how it hides so much important parts of an article. How is a reader/editor supposed to bring up their concerns if they don't clearly know that there is a talk page? What if they felt that the article suddenly changed drastically and wanted to view the article history? What if they landed on the wrong article and can't see the hatnotes that usually tell them about the article they likely wanted? The blog post has this to say: > Why Wikipedia? Because you often stumbled upon it and thought “Urgh, it’s so ugly!”? If so, you weren’t using it. You were looking at it. and I think it rings quite true.
- edgyswingset 11y ago
  Except Wikiwand isn't a Wikipedia redesign. It's explicitly a Wikipedia reader, and even advertises itself in that way.