5 ms·

I agree very much in principle. The wikipedia desktop site is beautiful, functional, fast, and doesn't change every 6 months to chase trends (unlike every god-d

I agree very much in principle. The wikipedia desktop site is beautiful, functional, fast, and doesn't change every 6 months to chase trends (unlike every god-damn website today it seems). That being said I don't understand why the sidebar should be collapsible (and collapsed by default). It's just an extra click to access functionality with some people rely on (languages, for example, being probably one of the most used).

systemvoltage 6y ago
Design should not be trendy. It is not fashion. I hope we don't bloat up wikipedia pages with too much whitespace. Getting of borders, "minimal" looks bother me so much because they're sacrificing layout for aesthetics. There is a reason why borders exist. It is a line segment that separates logically laid out content into groups. I want Wikipedia to stay the same even if it is not ideal. There is a lot of legacy and "learned" behavior. We need to add the familiarization factor to any UI changes. The amount of changes should at the minimum exceed the accrued familiarization of the UI...the longer the design remains the same, the higher this factor. It is crazy to think that we should not make a change if it is for the better, but there are a lot of people ... millions that use this less-than-ideal UI. There is something to be said about that. Typographically, Wikipedia pages have too wide of a column width. This is a common problem not just with webpages, but with magazines and newspapers. There is a reason why the dimension of a book (such as a novel) is smaller than a magazine and that has to do with how wide of a column is comfortable for reading. We need to look at how magazines and newspapers solve this problem. They use columns. Larger fonts is not the answer nor is excessive whitespace because you're not solving the layout issue. It is just magnification. If newspapers didn't exist and if web designers today were tasked to design a physical newspaper, it would be bloody 80 pages long and full of massive margins and fonts with no understanding about density of presentation. The web needs to be treated like physical media (yes, I said that, fight me). It is a rectangular 2D space that presents text - no difference to my retina whether it is a magazine, newspaper or LCD monitor in terms of spatial representation (not talking about contrast/backlit aspects). This was different a while ago, but today, the pixel density is great and we can almost treat monitors like paper (again, not talking about backlit issues). Web designers today won't be able to design a physical telephone book. It would be called "Too overwhelming" for the user and it would be insanely big in 17 volumes.
- andrepd 6y ago
  With regards to line width, I don't understand 100% what you're saying. You agree that it is a problem, not because of aesthetics but because of readability. But then how do you propose to solve it? The only solutions are either increase font size (messing up things since now font size is tied to monitor width), or pad the sides with whitespace (what they're doing).
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    Or do columns like a newspaper, but it's unusual on the web.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    Increasing font size is magnification of the entire column, so you sacrifice the vertical space along with it. Line height can't go lower after a specific point - Arial for example, with font size of 12 points needs to have enough line-height of 16 points. Again, increasing the font size is not the solution. The second point about padding the sides with whitespace causes waste of screen real-estate for no reason other than to give comfortable width to read. This is what NYtimes articles do: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/business/goldman-sachs-font.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/business/goldman-sachs-fo... So left and right sides are unnecessarily wasted. The solution I am proposing is to use multiple columns. At desktop size, you get 3 columns. At tablet size, 2. On the phones, its single column. There might be better solutions to this but I can't think of any. Columns are how Magazines do their layout of text. It is also part of the international style in graphics design. Counter point: Magazines had to use columns to conserve space and page count. Each page adds cost. In digital media, we don't have such limits. The only down side is the user has to scroll a lot. But we have devised a scroll wheel and most users have this tool.
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      > At desktop size, you get 3 columns. At tablet size, 2. On the phones, its single column. There might be better solutions to this but I can't think of any. This is makes it hard to handle flowing content. Do you add artificial pages to break up the content or does scrolling cascade up each of the columns? Then there's the issue of typesetting being an NP hard problem. Even Word needs a lot of hand-holding when using multi-column layouts because it often produces poor results. I don't necessarily mind the excessive whitespace when I'm reading, because I prefer to not have to move my head and eyes too while reading. But having a lot of content on the page at once, like you're proposing, is really beneficial in technical situations, where I need to move between different pieces of information, like taking notes.
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
This is the change I understand the least. If it was about actually collapsing the sidebar I'd understand, but it seems to literally just hide features and replace them with a useless grey area.
romkin 6y ago
Same here, I hate it. Here's a userscript that expands the language sidebar: https://github.com/ayyrx/userscripts/raw/master/wpfix/wpfix.user.js https://github.com/ayyrx/userscripts/raw/master/wpfix/wpfix.... Edit `const enableLanguageSidebarAltView = true` to `const enableLanguageSidebarAltView = false` to make it look exactly like it used to do before that dumb button was implemented

systemvoltage 6y ago

Design should not be trendy. It is not fashion. I hope we don't bloat up wikipedia pages with too much whitespace. Getting of borders, "minimal" looks bother me so much because they're sacrificing layout for aesthetics. There is a reason why borders exist. It is a line segment that separates logically laid out content into groups. I want Wikipedia to stay the same even if it is not ideal. There is a lot of legacy and "learned" behavior. We need to add the familiarization factor to any UI changes. The amount of changes should at the minimum exceed the accrued familiarization of the UI...the longer the design remains the same, the higher this factor. It is crazy to think that we should not make a change if it is for the better, but there are a lot of people ... millions that use this less-than-ideal UI. There is something to be said about that. Typographically, Wikipedia pages have too wide of a column width. This is a common problem not just with webpages, but with magazines and newspapers. There is a reason why the dimension of a book (such as a novel) is smaller than a magazine and that has to do with how wide of a column is comfortable for reading. We need to look at how magazines and newspapers solve this problem. They use columns. Larger fonts is not the answer nor is excessive whitespace because you're not solving the layout issue. It is just magnification. If newspapers didn't exist and if web designers today were tasked to design a physical newspaper, it would be bloody 80 pages long and full of massive margins and fonts with no understanding about density of presentation. The web needs to be treated like physical media (yes, I said that, fight me). It is a rectangular 2D space that presents text - no difference to my retina whether it is a magazine, newspaper or LCD monitor in terms of spatial representation (not talking about contrast/backlit aspects). This was different a while ago, but today, the pixel density is great and we can almost treat monitors like paper (again, not talking about backlit issues). Web designers today won't be able to design a physical telephone book. It would be called "Too overwhelming" for the user and it would be insanely big in 17 volumes.

andrepd 6y ago
With regards to line width, I don't understand 100% what you're saying. You agree that it is a problem, not because of aesthetics but because of readability. But then how do you propose to solve it? The only solutions are either increase font size (messing up things since now font size is tied to monitor width), or pad the sides with whitespace (what they're doing).
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  Or do columns like a newspaper, but it's unusual on the web.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Increasing font size is magnification of the entire column, so you sacrifice the vertical space along with it. Line height can't go lower after a specific point - Arial for example, with font size of 12 points needs to have enough line-height of 16 points. Again, increasing the font size is not the solution. The second point about padding the sides with whitespace causes waste of screen real-estate for no reason other than to give comfortable width to read. This is what NYtimes articles do: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/business/goldman-sachs-font.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/business/goldman-sachs-fo... So left and right sides are unnecessarily wasted. The solution I am proposing is to use multiple columns. At desktop size, you get 3 columns. At tablet size, 2. On the phones, its single column. There might be better solutions to this but I can't think of any. Columns are how Magazines do their layout of text. It is also part of the international style in graphics design. Counter point: Magazines had to use columns to conserve space and page count. Each page adds cost. In digital media, we don't have such limits. The only down side is the user has to scroll a lot. But we have devised a scroll wheel and most users have this tool.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    > At desktop size, you get 3 columns. At tablet size, 2. On the phones, its single column. There might be better solutions to this but I can't think of any. This is makes it hard to handle flowing content. Do you add artificial pages to break up the content or does scrolling cascade up each of the columns? Then there's the issue of typesetting being an NP hard problem. Even Word needs a lot of hand-holding when using multi-column layouts because it often produces poor results. I don't necessarily mind the excessive whitespace when I'm reading, because I prefer to not have to move my head and eyes too while reading. But having a lot of content on the page at once, like you're proposing, is really beneficial in technical situations, where I need to move between different pieces of information, like taking notes.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

This is the change I understand the least. If it was about actually collapsing the sidebar I'd understand, but it seems to literally just hide features and replace them with a useless grey area.

romkin 6y ago

Same here, I hate it. Here's a userscript that expands the language sidebar: https://github.com/ayyrx/userscripts/raw/master/wpfix/wpfix.user.js https://github.com/ayyrx/userscripts/raw/master/wpfix/wpfix.... Edit `const enableLanguageSidebarAltView = true` to `const enableLanguageSidebarAltView = false` to make it look exactly like it used to do before that dumb button was implemented