
Wikipedia redesign - bbx
http://jgthms.com/wikipedia-redesign.html
======
tptacek
Wikipedia seems like it would be one of the very hardest challenges for a
portfolio project. That's because Wikipedia is almost certain to be around 50
years from now. We don't think about it all that often, because we live our
lives in its presence, sort of like the people in Rome who live near the
Colosseum probably spend most of their days seeing it as just another big
stone building.

I wouldn't want to be the architect proposing gleaming flowing metal facades
and LED screens for the Colosseum, either.

Whatever you do to Wikipedia has to make sense not just today, in the way a
magazine cover design might need to work as a valid UX and an on-trend design,
but also 10, 20, 40 years from now. Wikipedia is conservative in a way that
very few Internet sites are; they're the caretakers of something --- I feel
weird writing this, and maybe I'm wrong, but here goes --- world-historically
important.

~~~
Osmium
This seems especially true considering (a) how much web design has changed in
the last few years due to mobile devices and the responsive web and (b) how
unprepared we were for that change.

I'm frequently reminded that the most readable _and accessible_ (albeit,
admittedly, boring) websites out there are ones that are just plain old-school
HTML–no javascript, no CSS, or anything like that.

~~~
madeofpalk
> I'm frequently reminded that the most readable [...] no CSS

I doubt it.

CSS can be a whole lot less than just fancy floats and parallax scrolling.

~~~
jarrett
Yep. Namely: typeface, font size, line height, margins, font color, background
color. Those are some pretty basic properties you'll want to set for even the
most minimal design. CSS is how you set them. (I suspect that almost nobody
would want to use the browser defaults for all these values.)

~~~
Osmium
I'm not saying I disagree, but there is a benefit to default values, and
that's a unified design throughout the web. For the technically inclined, we
can always use custom CSS, but often the people who would benefit the most
from it are the people who would have the least idea how to do it. Edit: To
put it another way, and bring it back on topic, it's no surprise Wikipedia
uses black text on a white background with blue hyperlinks, and I doubt that
will change any time soon.

I do realise I'm basically describing Gopher here, and there's possibly a
reason it didn't take off...

~~~
jarrett
> there is a benefit to default values, and that's a unified design throughout
> the web.

If only browsers provided better defaults. As it stands, very few people would
consider the browser defaults acceptable.

> it's no surprise Wikipedia uses black text on a white background with blue
> hyperlinks

Yes, Wikipedia does use black text, a white background, and blue links. But
they do not merely rely upon the default browser stylesheets. They use custom
font-face, font-size, line-height, and margin properties even for the basic
<p> tag. And that's saying nothing about all the other elements that often
have borders, padding, backgrounds, and so on.

------
davidgerard
Standard reference:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesign...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesigns)

tl;dr ideas are always welcome, but most redesigns ignore that the site is not
US-only, English-only or Latin-only.

~~~
Zikes
[http://wikipediaredefined.com/](http://wikipediaredefined.com/)

Step 1: Toss out the globe covered in runes from languages from all around the
world and just use the Latin W.

Step 2: Remove or hide all languages except English from the home page, and
hide the means to access those other languages under options and accessors
written in English.

Step 3: Replace or supplement menu items with graphic symbols likely only
recognized or used in Western cultures.

Step 4: Throw in a Share button because Social or whatever. Also include a
Print button that likely only works in certain browsers because nobody knows
how to use their browser's built-in Print button.

Step 5: Install Frontpage on Wikipedia.

Step 6: More colors and graphics.

It's as if the article was written about this very redesign.

~~~
DanBC
You forgot the metastep of "designer choses to use a weird, ugly, font on
their web page that reduces readability"

~~~
gkya
I so concur! Thought they were writing “Jmagine” and “Jt” instead of “Imagine”
and “It” to look cool or something.

------
anthemcg
This feels unnecessary. Everyone gets it: you can't actually redesign a
website with a few random mock-ups and visual updates. That so often is not
the point of an unsolicited redesign.

Most of these people are young designers looking to practice, have fun or
create something tangible to demonstrate some of their skills. Its clear that
changing a button or making a visual change doesn't equate to UX expertise.
However, for a lot of designers this material gets them attention and gives
potential employers common context to evaluate them and maybe they are a UI
designer who wants to display their visual skills. There are a lot of reasons
to take it too seriously but I encourage young designers to do it. A redesign
can help me evaluate certain skills in a junior candidate and they are fun to
look at. Redesigning stuff is fun, who cares if you want enjoy yourself.

So, I'm not sure who this for. Convincing a designer not to do a redesign of a
website and post it on their blog? What's the harm? These redesigns don't
actually change the industry understanding or perception enough to matter. We
need to calm down and just enjoy these redesigns for what they are.

~~~
tptacek
There's no real harm, except potentially to the up-and-coming designer, who is
signaling something about their design process by writing something like this.
Wikipedia has a lot of design constraints that other sites don't have. A _big_
part of the job of being a professional designer is discovering and navigating
design constraints. So when you pick Wikipedia as your "bucket list" portfolio
spec design example, you might want to be careful that you're not
communicating something about your process (specifically: obliviousness) that
you don't mean to communicate.

Spec designs are fun to read and while I'm not a designer and have no business
offering career advice to one, I'm happy to encourage people to keep doing
them so I can keep reading and snipping at them. But there are safer targets
to pick than Wikipedia.

~~~
anthemcg
I have to agree that Wikipedia is not a good target for a redesign. Also, I
don't think its on every designer's bucket list. But, Its fair to assume that
a lot of people select Wikipedia specifically because it has such an uncommon
set of constraints.

To make assumptions about design process based on something like the choice to
do a "redesign" of Wikipedia sounds generally useless : Especially coming from
a junior designer who I guarantee is not thinking that hard about it.

I am just saying : Everyone is getting way too serious about unsolicited
redesigns. I think the article makes valid points about what design is and
what defines user experience but It feels mean-spirited and the targeting at
redesigns is mis-directed.

------
saltvedt
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.

------
return0
Actually it seems they DID a redesign recently. The article title appears in
Times instead of helvetica. (Edit: it's Georgia)

~~~
awhitty
Relevant link:
[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh)

------
gee_totes
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:

[https://github.com/geetotes/wikipedia-
theme](https://github.com/geetotes/wikipedia-theme)

~~~
davidgerard
There's some work going on in MediaWiki to try to separate out theming stuff
so that it's actually feasible to write a good theme. A big problem is that
Vector, the default skin for MediaWiki and Wikipedia, half lives in an
extension and not in the skins directory.

------
nperez
The comment about design features working only in the designer's context
definitely rang a bell for me. The most common one for me is the section
containing just enough space for the designer's sample text, which is
conveniently very small. Fast-forward to the moment the design gets actually
coded up, and we've got ellipsified text all over the place.

------
DanBC
> The thing is, there is in the long run no incentive to alter Wikipedia’s
> content and degrade its integrity. The collaborative authority will prevent
> it anyway.

People don't need much incentive to do stupid things. There's not much
incentive to toss trash out a car window rather than into a bin, but people do
that every day.

There's a bunch of mindless minor vandalism that happens on WP because of
that.

Some parts of WP are really horrible. Ignore all the obvious places (anything
to do with Ireland or Northern Ireland; Israel and Palestine; Abortion; etc).
But quiet gnomic uncontroversial edits can get mired up. Someone makes some
good faith (and valid) changes to punctuation and spelling. They are quickly
reverted by an overzealous twinkle user on "vandal patrol" (wikipedia has done
a lot to stop this problem and that needs to be recognised) who also leaves a
warning template. The newbie gnomic editor removes the template and reverts
the article reversion, and is then receives multiple templates. I don't know
how many people have a first experience of WP like that, or find it repeated
if they try again, and it would be good to know. But the point of mentioning
this is that the toxic parts of WP are a strong incentive to some people to
"stick one over" to the WP community. Long term sleeper accounts making a
variety of good edits with a few known bad edits; concern trolling; wiki-
lawyering; etc. There are plenty of meta-wikipedia places where very long
threads can draw in many users to spend a long time talking about stuff which
is, at its core, nonsense.

I suspect the future-people may find the meta stuff, especially comparing the
meta stuff across different wikipedias, more interesting than actual WP.

~~~
scrollaway
Its not about incentive for people who litter and vandalize, its about what
the majority of people want.

Otherwise, there would be more trash outside the bins than inside them.
Thankfully, most places aren't like this.

~~~
DanBC
I live in England. There is plenty of trash outside wastebins. Especially if
you see the streets before the streetsweepers have been through.

The fact that there exist specially designed and built vehicles to sweep
pavements to clean them of litter, and these are supplemented by workers with
hand push carts and litter picking sticks, shows some need for litter
collection. Litter costs about £1bn per year and we're still a pretty dirty
country. (I did notice on my visits to California that they were _much_
cleaner. Partly that's about lack of rain, but also it's because people just
don't drop as much litter.). Californians are usually surprised at just how
dirty London is.

David Sedaris hates litter.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r11wc](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r11wc)

------
bryang
the best website design principles:
[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

~~~
Semaphor
Only I have to resize my window to actually read the text.

People always say just plain is great, but we live in a world in which many
people now have bigger widescreen monitors.

Sites like this work great on smaller screen and even mobile. But they are bad
UX for big screen users.

~~~
nandhp
> I have to resize my window to actually read the text [...] we live in a
> world in which many people now have bigger widescreen monitors

I'm sorry, I just don't understand this whole "people have widescreen
monitors, so designers need to decide how wide something should be" idea.
"Because people have wider monitors than they used to" seems like a
meaningless excuse to me, since windows have been resizable since Douglas
Engelbart's Mother of All Demos in 1968 (more than 40 years ago).

In my opinion, when you choose a size for your web browser, you are signaling
to the webpage which region of your screen you would like to have filled with
content. If your screen is too wide to read full-width text comfortably, you
should just keep the web browser resized to 83% of your screen width (or
whatever) instead of having it maximized all the time. Most web browsers will
even remember your preference from one time to the next. Plus, if you do want
something to fill your screen (and you don't use Mac OS) it's one click to
maximize the window temporarily.

Nothing's ever stopped designers from over-designing webpages (many people
would point to scroll-to-animate webpages), but I really don't think that
maximum width (or, worse, minimum width!) is some necessary thing for
designers to dictate, since it's so easy for users to choose a width that's
comfortable for them.

~~~
varkson
You say that but your average user isn't going to make sure they keep their
browser window to some arbitrary amount. People just tend to makes it
fullscreen, myself included.

------
benaston
Totally agree. Good design sense appears to be incredibly rare, and it's
unfortunate that major sites simply copy each other's designs resulting in UI
trends not based on sound design, but fashion. See the pervasive fixed
position header for a good example.

------
thaumaturgy
Off-topic, but what happened to "www."? More and more sites recently seem to
be going without a www subdomain.

In this case, "www.jgthms.com" goes to a Gandi parking page. (!) In other
cases, the connection simply times out or the server returns an error page.

~~~
verisimilitude
My understanding is that the number of people who like leaving off the www
exceeds the number who remember to redirect all requests correctly. I believe
the nginx server block would read something like:

    
    
      server_name www.website.tld;
      rewrite     ^ http://website.tld$request_uri? permanent;

~~~
DonPellegrino
Use return instead of rewrite.

    
    
        server {
            listen 80;
            server_name www.website.tld;
            return 301 http://website.tld$request_uri;
        }

~~~
scrollaway
Please back up your claims with a reason - all you're giving us is a different
way to do things here.

~~~
lewaldman
SEO. And it's just one reason.

~~~
scrollaway
What does SEO have to do with this?

~~~
lewaldman
It counts as duplicated content.

A 301 is a redirect. It sends to the client the instruction to reload the page
in the given Address.

A rewrite happens only on the server side. So for the client it's like two
different sites with the same content, and this hurts your ranking.

Now... Ok that I didn't explained that on the parent post (didn't thought it
was needed), but is it enough reason to a downvote? :P

edit: fixed grammar.

~~~
scrollaway
Rewrites in nginx are redirects.

~~~
peferron
Only a subset of rewrites are redirects. A common usecase for rewrites is to
change the request URI to make it match another location block in your config,
but without returning 301 or 302 or any other redirect code to the client.

------
peterchon
the last paragraph should be a required reading for all designers.

------
tucosan
I really don't see the problem here. Why shouldn't people try their hand with
a wikipedia redesign? It's a great (and admittedly very hard) challenge. Which
doesn't mean that people shouldn't keep trying.

But maybe people should indeed hit for easier targets first - maybe they could
offer bbx a redesign for his own blog?

Looking at his copy text running all to the bottom of the page without any
bottom space or even a footer
[https://imgur.com/bC3RuHv](https://imgur.com/bC3RuHv) I feel physical pain
looking at his site. But what do I know? I'm just a designer...

~~~
greenpizza13
Did you purposefully cut the bottom white space off to prove a point. IE, FF,
and Chrome all render the space at the bottom.

------
gojomo
Aspiring artists don't paint bowls of fruit because the world needs another
painting of a bowl of fruit.

Let people practice and show off their evolving craft.

------
nathell
Whew. I was fearing this was yet another
[http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/](http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/) but
fortunately I was wrong.

~~~
gkoberger
While I 100% agree with the original article, this redesign actually isn't
bad. They actually did a good job staying faithful to what makes Wikipedia
important.

That being said, I think sites like HN, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Reddit, etc are
iconically ugly rather than generically pretty -- and that's good.

~~~
davidgerard
No, it failed a pile of really obvious client requirements:
[http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-August...](http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-August/121650.html)

This is the page where we try to be polite about designers' crappy redesigns:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesign...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesigns)

------
josephschmoe
Does anyone actually use the main page of Wikipedia? I just look it up on
Google and a relevant article shows up. It's the same way I view
stackoverflow.

~~~
privong
It's sometimes interesting to check to see recently added articles which are
highlighted, "this day in history" items, as well as recent major news items
which I might have missed.

------
mangeletti
I agree with the author's thesis, that many designers design for aesthetics
and not for usability, but I couldn't help but think that he did with this
article exactly what he was shunning as useless, which is to address the
design of Wikipedia to gain prominence, and all this without even the effort
of opening Photoshop... the irony is terrific.

------
NAFV_P
A very good example of website design [0]:

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/news](https://news.ycombinator.com/news)

~~~
varkson
No way, HN is shockingly bad. It's the only site where I feel like an extra
stylesheet is necessary. Text is too small and hard to read.

~~~
NAFV_P
> _Text is too small and hard to read._

I would totally agree on that point, but I just use zoom.

------
ScottWhigham
It took me a while to "get it" mostly b/c I've been conditioned to think this
was going to actually be yet another Wikipedia redesign haha. In typically web
scanning mode, I skipped over (what I thought was the image caption) _I didn’t
change anything because there is nothing to change. Or at least, not enough to
prompt a complete graphical overhaul._ Kudos - well played.

I suppose we won't have to wait long for the "HN redesign" or "reddit
redesign" variants either.

~~~
DanBC
There are plenty of HN redesign attempts.

It seems that people like attempts to increase the size or spacing of the vote
buttons which makes accidental downvotes harder.

It seems lots of people dislike the reduced information density. Some of the
redesigns use a lot of whitespace which can be nice but means you only have 10
stories on the front page.

Currently the only thing I'd really like to see is some 80 character indicator
for the title box on the submission page. That would mean that people could
remove small unimportant parts to fit in the limit, ratherthan just chopping
out perhaps important words.

