
Das Referenz: Wikipedia Redesigned for iPad - sygma
https://medium.com/@raureif/65af999b576d
======
chime
If the creators of this project are reading this thread, I hope you don't take
the criticisms here too personally. I don't know why nearly every new project
on HN gets completely ripped apart nowadays unless it's some clever hack or
backed by a popular/famous creator.

I think the app looks great and compared to the desktop/mobile versions of the
Wikipedia website, it is a significant improvement when it comes to
readability. So what if it doesn't do justify or support editing content.
Justify is a minor setting that can be easily implemented and editing could be
a v2.0 feature if the project gains traction.

I love reading Kindle and iBooks on my iPad and it's fantastic that I can now
access Wikipedia with the same readability features. You should definitely
continue to make improvements, from tables to justification. Keep adding more
integration with Wikidata. Maybe allow users to treat any Wikipedia article
like an e-book by enabling notes, bookmarking, highlighting etc. I know it's
hard to deal with ever changing content but maybe let the user save a specific
version with highlight/notes to the iPad (and enable cloud sync).

~~~
sgdesign
It's just so much easier and safer to nit-pick than to take the time to
explain what you love about something.

But hey, on the plus side nit-picks can be useful to a project creator too, if
only to help them anticipate people's objections better.

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rakoo
> it was clear from the beginning that using Wikipedia means reading articles,

> The most important use case for Wikipedia is filling the search field and
> choosing the correct search result.

See ? That's why your redesign will never _ever_ be even considered by the
Wikimedia team: _The most important use case for Wikipedia is editing
content_.

Wikipedia has become what it is and lives because every single human can bring
its knowledge and share it with other humans. The Wikimedia (and Wikipedia)
team isn't involved in editing content: it "merely" hosts the application.
It's up to us, the humans from everywhere, to fill Wikipedia with our
knowledge, and it's up to you, the UX/UI designers, to make sure we have the
best experience while doing it, so it doesn't feel
clunky/difficult/unpleasant. If you remove the _edit_ ability, you effectively
kill Wikipedia.

Please stop this. (At least we agree on one point: there are too many attempts
at redesigns, and too little work done on actually important projects[0])

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor)

~~~
vacri
I guess it depends on your definitions. I agree that the _most important_ use
case for Wikipedia is editing, but the _primary_ use case is reading. Out of
stereotypical 100 users, only 1 creates and only a further 9 edit on
wikipedia, apparently (from a few years ago). They might instead consider that
the primary use is the most important?

------
wolfgke
If you like to use German names, please observe that "Das Referenz" is not
correct German (for native German "Das Referenz" sounds like the German spoken
by less able Turkish immigrants, especially when combined with an accent).
"Referenz" is a female noun - thus "Die Referenz" is correct German.

~~~
3rd3
Maybe to keep it gender neutral?

~~~
sp332
It's not about male or female people, but about a linguistic feature where
certain words are _syntactically_ "masculine" or "feminine".
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Correlation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Correlation_between_gender_and_the_form_of_a_noun)

~~~
3rd3
I meant an extreme form of gender-neutral planned language.

Another reason might be that "Die" clashes with the English verb "to die".

------
zdw
Apparently the app lays down ads on Wikipedia's content unless you cough up $3
or $5.

That sounds questionable at best to me.

~~~
matthewmacleod
Why? From a legal standpoint, it's obviously permitted under either the GFDL
or the CC-BY-SA license. From an ethical standpoint, the developers of the app
have obviously invested time in this; it's not even like it's a zero-effort
shell around the website. I can't see any problem with releasing an ad-
supported version.

~~~
shittyanalogy
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advertisements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advertisements)

Including advertisements in a research resource lends itself to all sorts of
moral problems, and quite frankly completely obliterates and chance of
increased usefulness of the redesign.

------
currysausage
_> Let’s get this straight: UI-wise, Wikipedia teleports its audience into the
year 2004._

Yep, and it feels _wonderful._

~~~
the_af
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.

~~~
sgdesign
Isn't what you're saying in essence replacing the cult of "Newer Is Better" by
the cult of "Newer Is Worse"?

You can't know that Wikipedia doesn't need a redesign until you _see_ that
redesign. People 7 years ago thought their phones were just fine, until they
saw the iPhone.

~~~
the_af
I admit I'm a bit conservative, technologically speaking. But no, I don't
subscribe to the cult of Newer Is Worse either. Mostly, I reject the notion
that saying "Wikipedia teleports its audience into the year 2004" is valid
criticism of its UI.

------
model-m
I'm getting tired of young designers who use things like "this feels so 2004"
as an insult, and then proceed to reinvent the mistakes of the past.

------
ulfw
What's this thing of using German words or expressions wrongly lately? No,
it's not uuuuber. It's Über. And hell no it's not 'Das Referenz' either, it's
'Die Referent'. And while I'm at it, a Wiener Schnitzel surely isn't a hot dog
(hello American fast food chain!). Might as well call a chicken soup
'hamburger' while you're at it...

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Mithaldu
Besides the terrible and pointless abuse of "Das", i find myself amazed that
these people purport to be interested in typography, use the article about
Gutenberg as their header, and then fail to use "text-align: justify;" as the
default for paragraphs.

Edit: On reading further, i find that they did consider it, but decided
against providing something that looks great and is helpful to the reader in
99.99999% of all cases, because the remaining 0.00001% don't look perfect.
Instead they opt for a solution that is decidedly mediocre² in _all_ cases.
Brilliant.

² Note how in the header, Buchprodukti-on is hyphened very awkwardly, while
Buchdrucks, a prime candidate, isn't at all.

~~~
currysausage
I'm not a fan of this project either (see my other comment), but I totally
agree with them on this one. Justified text is _really_ hard to get right,
even with TeX, InDesign and the like, and simply placing "text-align:
justify;" in your CSS _will_ worsen the quality and therefore the readability:
Gaps will occur between all words in every other line, which doesn't only look
ugly, but also destroys the flow of reading.

Left justification is always preferable over _bad_ full justification; I don't
know many (read: any) typographers who would disagree.

The first of Tschichold's _Penguin Composition Rules_ (always worth reading -
[http://s3.amazonaws.com/tsch/compositionrules.html](http://s3.amazonaws.com/tsch/compositionrules.html))
says: _" All text composition should be as closely word-spaced as possible."_
By relying on automatic full justification, you violate that rule in cruel
ways. _" Wide spaces should be strictly avoided."_

~~~
Mithaldu
You'll be hard-pressed to find any wikipedia article that looks bad with it,
unless you zoom in to something like 6 words per line on average.

Edit to your edit: I don't particularly care for your appeal to authority when
experience has borne out for me that wildly varying line lenghts hinder
reading considerably more than occasional gaps. Besides, your authority
doesn't even mention justification or alignment, as such i question your
binding his statement to that matter.

~~~
currysausage
Actually, the first line of the first article that I F12'ed looked horrible.
(Despite 18 words per line.) Typography is a really subtle craft.

~~~
Mithaldu
Your claims would hold more weight if you actually demonstrated them. Also it
would be nice if you actually marked your copious edits into your post as
edits.

------
michaelmior
Looks awesome! Not sure I love the colour scheme, but overall a huge
improvement. Unfortunately I'm an Android user. Hope to see this come there
sometime soon :)

~~~
officemonkey
I think the Wikipedia app on Android actually looks pretty good, especially on
my 7 inch Nexus tablet.

I'm looking forward for this one to be ported someday. I'd pay a couple bucks
for it even.

~~~
kefs
Wikimedia just released the new Wikipedia Beta on the Play store yesterday, if
you haven't checked it out.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia.beta)

------
shittyanalogy
Wikipedia is a tool not an app. Tools are designed to be useful not beautiful.
Wikipedia extremely useful as is. Any significant change must be a large leap
in usefulness to overcome the burden of having to re-teach hundreds of
millions of people how to use the tool. Having a specific platform with a
unique interface is counter productive at best.

Wikipedia is not stuck in 2004, it's not stuck anywhere. It continues to grow,
flourish and be useful to hundreds of millions of people over all sorts of
connections and on all sorts of devices.

Thinking how much better wikipedia would be if it were beautiful is like
thinking how much better your hammer would be if it were beautiful.

~~~
ysleepy
thats a shitty analogy.

Also wikipedia has more technical dept than the worst govmnt project.

Just look at the php backend shit. The parser alone makes people blind. There
does not exist a grammar.

You cannot process the content properly, because only their current php thing
parses tge wkitext as the author intended, and it consists of 65% quirks and
hacks.

The layout/ html rendering is 10y in the past. I can think of a dozen helpful
things the html pages could do, but its not possible because of the rottten
backend that literally takes minutes to render some articles.

And that with millions of donations. Wikimedia sucks so hard its almost like
they purposefully want to wikipedia from evolving.

------
DrinkWater
Whats with the Obsession for the German word "Das"? It's also wrong in this
case.

~~~
GyrosOfWar
Yeah.. If you're gonna give your app a name from a foreign language, at least
look it up in a dictionary. "Die Referenz" would be correct.

~~~
swoker
Even worse, it's a german company. So they're probably screwing us on purpose.

------
Noctem
Am I the only one who immediately thought of vas deferens upon reading the
name?

------
3rd3
[https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/1200/1*YDjL7m1JuPW...](https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/1200/1*YDjL7m1JuPWqa-k1JnVO4w.png)

I consider that as a feature. I don’t mind text in 7pt on a small screen if it
allows me to find more quickly what I’m looking for.

------
mauricesvay
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.

------
flohofwoe
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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skrebbel
Is there edit functionality? If not, it's not even remotely "Wikipedia
redesigned". More like a personal wikicontent bot.

That said, if it does, I want it. Please port to everywhere.

~~~
keeperofdakeys
At least from the screenshots, I couldn't see links to such options (including
discussion and history). While most people would consider these unimportant, I
was quite surprised to see that I simply couldn't find them on the official
mobile app (not even behind a hidden menu). While most people just want to
read content, hiding the features that, (it could be argued) define wikipedia,
isn't what I'd call the best design. At the same time, you have to start
somewhere, and they may plan to add those features later.

Besides all that, I think it's a good bit of work. Well done devs.

------
lcnmrn
Is this just a WebView with a custom UserScript loaded? I don't have an iPad
to test it out.

