The previous Wikipedia design was so good that I never ever noticed it until they changed it. I personally dislike the new one. The pinnacle experience for me

The previous Wikipedia design was so good that I never ever noticed it until they changed it. I personally dislike the new one. The pinnacle experience for me is the “printable version” of the old layout. It was beautiful and simple. I actually don't mind the mobile version today. I can't tell what changed, which is probably a good sign. It feels fine to me. I think the prominence of the "Edit" button is interesting. It's a noble pursuit to democratize ownership of these documents. To empower anyone to be able to edit them. In that way, making Edit a first-class element when designing the layout is great. But in practice, I've experienced it to be daunting to edit anything. It often feels like I'm impinging upon the territory of some Wikipedia clique. Perhaps just a bad few experiences. I should try again. "In other words, Wikipedia — a major, legacy website (top 10 ranked, for 10+ years) — had an interface that hadn’t been changed for 15 years." It shocked me that what came next was effectively: "so let's change it!" You'd think the very facts in that sentence scream not to: it's been a top 10 website for 10+ years and hasn't been changed. I forget the exact quote, but something Bob Ross once said in an episode stuck with me: that it's very difficult to know when to stop; to know when your painting is done; to put the brush down. I have an (oftentimes undeserved) bias against designers where I feel like they can be stuck between a rock and a hard place: it's difficult to say to your employer, "yeah you don't really need me to do any major work here. Studies conclude that it's still a good design. Don't change it." It's so much easier to return with a list of recommendations. Even better if that means more work for you. Trivially: I thought it was amusing that the 2.1MB image of the two monitors from 19 years ago took many seconds to progressively load. I had to check if that was intentionally coded (it was not). Tangent (sorry I'm wandering): I miss the non-scanline progressive loading, where an image would slowly get sharper as it loaded. Is that still a viable option?