
Wikipedia Redesign Concept - vikram360
http://wikipedia.gkvasnikov.com/
======
okasaki
I'm stuggling to put into words how much I dislike designs like this -
superheavy javascript sites that work like ass on my netbook, full of empty
space and icons instead of text (so I have to hover over the icons to find out
what they do - where's the sense in this??) and customized "UI" functionality
that make me forever unsure what my clicks will produce.

Wikipedia has a plain but very pleasant interface and this would totally ruin
it for me.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
I'm guessing that this is just portfolio fodder for the designer. For better
or worse, recruiters (and hell, even managers) are looking for UX designers
that have the capacity to design trendy looking stuff and have a grasp of
what's somewhat relevant. Hence, redesigning a hugely-popular site like
Wikipedia to look like a recently-redesigned mobile first news site.

Just wanted to point that out before people rail on this redesign too much.
There are a lot of design anti-patterns in this redesign, but, again, it's the
result of having to market yourself to people who really don't know what
design is.

~~~
pestaa
As a developer with a blind spot for design anti-patterns, can you elaborate
on those?

~~~
zalzane
I'm not a designer and I don't know anything about anti-patterns, but here's
what grinds my gears about it:

-The layout switches between using icons and text as buttons/menu items on the same page

-The homepage looks like aol/yahoo's landing page - too busy and no sense of direction

-theres like 3 different bar selection menus on the front page, all in different places that do dramatically different things. I don't have any kind of visual cues into what the bar menu on the top or right do.

-gigantic images and padding reduce information density

------
tptacek
The heavily-graphical "grid" front page assumes that the best Wikipedia
articles have curated, attractive graphics to place in the grid. As a rule,
they do not. Wikipedia is a volunteer project, and there are no editors or in-
house designers to keep articles fashionably decked out. Not only that, but
Wikipedia is at a disadvantage w/r/t/ graphics: the site tries to be
scrupulous about copyrights, and can't appropriate random images or, for that
matter, pay licensing fees for them.

Similarly, some of the layouts of the tiles in the front-page grid appear to
have carefully chosen typography. Who's doing that work?

~~~
gojomo
And yet, moving to a design that highlights a 'main graphic', or bit of hand-
crafted typography, could actually prompt that volunteer work when people
notice it's missing.

Do you design for the worst-case, where you're lucky to get a little attention
from overworked volunteers working outside their areas of competence? Or for a
more hopeful case, where any gaps in the design will signal an opportunity for
eager, precocious volunteers to do more?

I believe Wikipedia has had good success in the past with campaigns to fill in
CC-licensed rich media, especially volunteer photographs, where they've been
missing.

~~~
tptacek
This misses some of the point of the front page. "Featured Article" (FA)
status is one of the most important incentive schemes on the site. It's a case
where what's good for the front page is also good for the community. There's
nothing intrinsically good about having a nifty icon for a story, and not
every contributor working to lift some obscure article to FA status is going
to have that resource available.

------
vezzy-fnord
_Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world. It hasn’t been
changed or redefined during the last 10 years. The web and its technologies
has developed further and so have its users._

And why should it be changed? Wikipedia's design is one of the prime examples
of "simple, clean, effective", in my mind.

Frankly, the only good idea I see here is an integrated WYSIWYG wiki markup
editor. That might work, although MediaWiki markup isn't that hard to get
acquainted to, and it's probably a good thing that someone should spend a bit
of time to do so before making major edits.

Otherwise, this looks like some misguided attempt to make Wikipedia look more
like Medium, as ostensibly Medium is the future of UX. Magpies hopping on to
the newest trend, as always. Web design is notorious for this.

The front page is an overly cluttered dashboard that makes Wikipedia look like
a blog, more than anything else. Unnecessary, and quite constrained.

Article pages have been turned into trailing, centered sprawls of text. Works
for blogs, but not for an online encyclopedia. The present design is more
suited to Wikipedia's features as a web project.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Wikipedia's font responsive and
dynamic? It adapts to whatever typeface is the default on your browser.

~~~
insertnickname
>Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world. It hasn’t been
changed or redefined during the last 10 years.

Actually, Wikipedia switched to a new theme a few years ago.

------
rburhum
The problem of re-designing something as popular Wikipedia (especially
something useful that has not changed in 10 years!) is that regardless of the
result (i.e. better or worse), you will face _fierce_ opposition. Humans are
very sensitive to anything that changes their mental model of how they think
something should work.

Think about radically updating some of these to see what I mean:

\- Facebook Newsfeed

\- HNs homepage

\- Vim interface

\- Google Search Page

\- Craigslist homepage

\- Your favorite web mail client

\- Your favorite Smartphone main screen

\- Reddit homepage

You can come up with the most amazing forward-thinking improvement, and
somebody _without a doubt_ will send you so much hate that you'll think it is
that person's only goal to wipe out your family line.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, it just means that we have to be aware
of that section of the population and come up with a strategy that either does
1) a slow migration for the people with old mental model, 2) provides an
alternative "classic" view, or 3) completely ignores that section of the
population since they may represent a very small minority. I tend to go for
1,2,3 in that order, but of course this can vary differently depending on the
project.

Nice job with the re-design by the way :)

~~~
bichiliad
Something really interesting (and relevant) is that in cases where a redesign
makes an interface markedly easier, it can still perform less favorably simply
because people liked knowing how to do something that most people couldn't
(i.e. using said interface). Take Ideo's redesign of the Bloomberg example,
for example.

[http://www.ideo.com/work/bloomberg-terminal-
concept](http://www.ideo.com/work/bloomberg-terminal-concept)

~~~
Jasper_
What's the point of the virtual post-it note? Why not use a regular post-it
note?

~~~
bichiliad
You know, not too sure. The micro-terminals make sense, but the virtual post-
its seem a bit odd.

------
shortformblog
Wikipedia just redesigned, actually, but it was a mere refonting which most
users barely even noticed (the most noticeable change was that the headers
were converted from sans-serif to serif). There was a slightly-more-ambitious
redesign that emphasized white space (like this one), but the foundation threw
out nearly all of the changes because users didn't like them.

[http://www.fastcodesign.com/3028615/the-beautiful-
wikipedia-...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/3028615/the-beautiful-wikipedia-
design-that-almost-was)

[http://associationsnow.com/2014/04/wikipedia-redesign-
barely...](http://associationsnow.com/2014/04/wikipedia-redesign-barely-
there/)

I'm not saying unsolicited redesigns like this don't have value, but there's a
decent reason why an unsolicited redesign like this will never go over with
its audience: Wikipedia is the ultimate design-by-committee product, and the
users have a lot of say as a result.

Also, Wikipedia has to hit a wider body of users, from dumbphones to outdated
browsers. That's a problem with redesigns like this in general: They're not
thinking in these terms because they're designing for the high end. Wikipedia
is a site that needs to prioritize the low end because it's run by a nonprofit
foundation whose goal is to spread information, not just create a snazzy user
experience.

It goes against everything we know about product design, and I agree it could
look nicer, but the current design approach works for the Wikimedia
Foundation.

------
oliv__
For those who get 503, you can also check out the concept on behance:
[https://www.behance.net/gallery/16219877/Wikipedia-
Redesign-...](https://www.behance.net/gallery/16219877/Wikipedia-Redesign-
Concept)

------
beefman
Why is lowering the information density of everything now considered good
design? Wikipedia's typography update a couple weeks ago brought increased
line spacing and it really sucks. Facebook used to have a great information-
rich design but went to 'cards' earlier this year and now I can see about 2.5
posts at a time (at 1200 lines). Medium and all the rest with their giant,
bold fonts, 90+ chars per line etc. tell us that the computing audience today
is expected to be mentally challenged, using some kind of handheld casino
gaming device, or both. It's a sad world to wake up in for those of us who
love computing.

Then there's OkCupid's question interface. The gateway to the greatest survey
of all time is now more low-density crap. And somebody thought a pulldown (a
custom one with its own quirky behavior, at that) was a good substitute for
radio buttons.

I guess it's not surprising when you consider what the design community talks
about. They don't measure anything that would let them detect a loss of
computing power. They don't think about cybernetics or cognitive psychology.
It's all "affordances" and other stuff that sounds like it was overheard in a
60s-era art gallery.

I can imagine a satirical redesign of the violin. They're so hard to use...
Except it's too late. Only a tiny fraction of people appreciate violin music
now. Such redesigns have been proposed in earnest! Shelves at electronic music
departments are filled with the prototypes. Only problem: the music people
made with them sucks.

------
esmooov
I don't understand why designers refuse to pay attention to typographic
guidelines. 95 characters per line is not very readable. To be fair, Wikipedia
already suffers from this problem. Between 100-character lines and sans-serif
body copy, Wikipedia's current typography is abysmal.

Otherwise this concept is fine. I'd love to see Wikipedia reset in Meta Serif
or Tisa at 66-72 characters-per-line.

~~~
dublinben
Reducing the number of characters per line on Wikipedia is as easy as making
your web browser narrower.

~~~
jakub_g
I hate resizing my web browser (it's always full screen), but I abuse the
sidebar [1] precisely for that.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/all-in-one-
si...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/all-in-one-sidebar/)

------
Springtime
For the goal of processing information quickly presenting the main articles as
a single column I felt would be less effective in the state the articles are
in currently, especially when there is enough room on widescreens, and where
graphics are used. The front page designs utilize the space better, and it
would be interesting to see how such a layout might be adapted for the
articles.

Another relevant point as someone mentioned earlier is Wikipedia isn't known
for beautifully curated professional photographs and design for every subject,
which comprises a significant focus of the concepts. Commercial sites with
similar grid designs, such as the Verge and other blogs often have a team of
photographers and/or designers to maintain the aesthetic, and are more liberal
with their use of copyrighted media.

Still love such new takes on established designs. Kudos to the designer for
stimulating discussion and bringing a focus to what could be improved.

------
aravindet
I love this redesign. It is definitely more readable and far more enjoyable;
removing the clutter of navigation links and bringing focus to the article are
massive improvements.

Of course, there will be challenges implementing this, including the lack of
images that can serve as article covers (or, for that matter, user avatars).
These problems can be solved if the community wanted this design; however the
community does NOT want it.

A much more moderate redesign was recently whittled down until it was just an
imperceptible font change; there's now a discussion about rolling that back as
well.

Your time and considerable talent is probably better spent on some other
projects; Wikipedia has a community that is extremely hostile to new people
and ideas.

------
bichiliad
I really like this. It would be cool to see this actually implemented.

For the record, it wasn't entirely obvious at first that I could click/drag
the individual rows on your site.

Also, for anyone that's curious, there have been several other redesign
concepts floating around (one here:
[http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/](http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/)),
although so far this one seems to be the most thought-out.

------
tsmash
Put your images on a cdn :)

~~~
keehun
That went down rather quickly... Didn't even get to see it yet

~~~
bsilvereagle
Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://wikipedia.gkvasnikov.com/)

But the cache isn't very useful since the images don't appear.

------
Artemis2
This kind of design is nice and all, but a site like Wikipedia wouldn't throw
everything they have like that: they want before all to keep their interface
available for everyone, even if that means it has to look a little rustic.

One change that would be very beneficial though, is improving legibility of
articles' text by having a way to adjust the number of character per line (see
[http://webtypography.net/2.1.2](http://webtypography.net/2.1.2)).

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asiekierka
No. A good part of Wikipedia is that it works and renders properly on almost
every device. Making such a HTML5/CSS3/JS-oriented redesign could heavily ruin
that.

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coherentpony
The page doesn't load completely for me. I'm using the latest Chrome.

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hunvreus
The main issue for a redesign at Wikipedia is not the lack of talented
designers and UX professionals.

The rigidity of the (old) underlying tech combined with the lack of media make
this kind of attempt moot.

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callesgg
Wikipedia has a functional/practical value, anything that lowers that value is
bad.

Anything that can increase that value/not decrese it while making the site
look better is good.

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yeukhon
I remember a few years ago there was a rising competitor to Wikipedia. I don't
remember the name but it was a wikipedia with video and slide shows.

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dalek2point3
isnt there a way to have your cake and eat it too? WIkipedia is CC-BY-SA so it
should be possible to maintain a mirror of Wikipedia with a more souped up
interface? I guess the costs of maintaining would be pretty high but Wikipedia
allows commercial use so you should be able to slap some advertising on it. in
fact im suprised people havent tried this already. perhaps they have?

~~~
peteretep
A browser plugin that applied a style-sheet and did image-selection would get
you much of the way there...

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alixaxel
Couldn't see everything because of the 503 errors, but seems really
interesting, thanks for sharing!

