10 ms·

Wikipedia Redefined

• derleth 14y ago
  Too much space is taken up by navigation in this scheme. There's a reason Wikipedia's design is dominated by text.
  • jwm 14y ago
    I agree. Websites that do this are awful, Google Plus is guilty of this. Re combo-boxing the language list: Wikipedia is the most successful multi-language website by far. Highlighting this to new and old users is a great thing. Its not like the search box takes up any more than one line anyway. For Wikipedia, this redesign blows. I do like the visual style though. This is really just showcasing the webdesign company's talent, right?
    • stephengillie 14y ago
      Wikipedia is probably the worst site for this redesign, which is probably why it's so eye catching - we're seeing all of these elements in a shape that's terrible for wiki but great for some other site. Since it's such a terrible fit for wiki, we can clearly see and identify elements we'd glaze over if we liked the changes.
  • dredmorbius 14y ago
    That's just the sort of element change that looks distinctive, and makes a redesign appear appealing, but almost certainly tests horribly under actual use. As another response notes, G+ is absolutely horrible at its content-to-navigation space allocation. The more so as most of the navigation elements are styled as "fixed", and won't move. I pretty much always view the site with an editor open to pick off the most annoying of these features. I'm working on a Stylish script.
  • zanny 14y ago
    This all the way. If you are trying to design a web page with usability in mind, the most important thing to do is make sure on the default 16:9 or 16:10 screen everyone is using that the content dominates the page with the least navigation overhead as possible. That is the main reason why I prefer sites that use vertical sidebars to horziontal top of the page navigation frames that take up 1/3 the initial load.
• calvin 14y ago
  I like the use of colors in the redefined design, but will it work for people with color-blindness?
• cmelbye 14y ago
  This is awesome. I'm not on board with everything (as someone else pointed out, the navigation is huge and overshadows the content), but it does a good job of rethinking how users interact with Wikipedia by making it easier to use for research. Unfortunately, I can't see anything like this ever happening due to inertia and the direct democracy system that Wikipedia generally employs when making changes.
  • kajecounterhack 14y ago
    If they made a mediawiki theme that could easily be applied or made an option, they might actually have a chance. << I don't think they did that though.
    • gee_totes 14y ago
      Agreed. I think the people who put this page together didn't realize that you can already customize the theme of Wikipedia. For example, here is the custom CSS theme I use to surf wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gee_totes/modern.css http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gee_totes/modern.css (it's not very custom, more of a PoC)
• sajithdilshan 14y ago
  functionality wise much more better than prevailing wikipedia. But still seems like a lot of clutter is there. And sister sites could use different icon (logo) scheme. Using a letter as an icon (or logo) can be confusing sometimes.
• jameswyse 14y ago
  Does anyone else find the font used on that page really distracting? What's with the I looking like a J?
  • JosephRedfern 14y ago
    This. Since when was an I a slightly smaller J?
    • Mystitat 14y ago
      Well ... i is a slightly smaller j.
    • dredmorbius 14y ago
      Actually, 'J' is a swashed 'I': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J
  • taylorfausak 14y ago
    I was going to say the same thing. The font is FF Schulbuch Süd Web Pro, and it looks like this: http://imgur.com/Uvft4 http://imgur.com/Uvft4. I can't fathom why it's designed like that. (Link to FontShop: http://www.fontshop.com/fonts/singles/fontfont/ff_schulbuch_sud_web_pro_regular/ http://www.fontshop.com/fonts/singles/fontfont/ff_schulbuch_...)
    • gurkendoktor 14y ago
      This is how I was taught cursive writing in school: http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:La-ges.jpg http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:La-ges.jpg I am German (as is the name of the font) and I could read the article without being distracted.
      • jerf 14y ago
        For comparison, a great deal of us in the US, if not most of us, were taught this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cursive.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cursive.svg And I hear this is fast on its way out, with cursive English script simply dying, with no replacement.
• fusiongyro 14y ago
  Overall, I think it's gorgeous, especially the page layout stuff. I don't like the logos especially, but having a "branded house" approach makes a lot of sense for uniting the disparate sites.
  • chris_wot 14y ago
    Each of those "disparate sites" has a working and passionate community contributing to it. Their approach is about as bad as it can get.
• dmazin 14y ago
  I'm not sure Wikipedia needs a rebranding, and tell me if I'm the only one, but I use Google to get to specific Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia's actual search and search results need to be re-implemented, but I don't agree about redesign beyond that. That leaves the actual articles. I like the way they are designed here, except for the monolithic nav bar. If anything, this is a nice theme for articles - and theming is a feature that has existed on Wikipedia for a number of years now.
• bherms 14y ago
  I'm a big fan of the reimagining of how people interact with the site.. I think that's a major step forward, but I was very displeased with the redesign. I definitely agree a redesign is in order, but I wasn't a fan of nearly any of the design work presented here. So the take away from this is: these guys rock at interaction design and UX, but still have a lot of work to do in the actual design dept. Keep in mind that this is just my opinion, however, and is entirely subjective.
• citricsquid 14y ago
  copying my comment from reddit: If a user doesn't recognise the word "English" then they are not going to have any idea what language select. The reason the languages are all listed on the page without any interaction needed is so someone can look at the webpage and recognise their language and select it without having to understand anything else. How do I access the main page of a wiki? This isn't redefined, it's just a redesign with some bad, some good, aesthetic changes.
  • jarek 14y ago
    Not to mention the front page colour bar for languages with labels appearing after rolling over has some pretty serious discoverability and accessibility issues.
    • Doches 14y ago
      2001 called; they want their mystery meat navigation back.
  • csense 14y ago
    The existing front-page looks like it should work in browsers with JS disabled (though I have not personally tested this). We should think carefully about the possible consequences of Wikipedia dropping support for no-JS browsers.
    • prodigal_erik 14y ago
      It does. Being properly engineered, it's semantically accessible with any browser or scraper or mashup. Sacrificing that for a site as important as Wikipedia doesn't even deserve serious consideration.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    • wangweij 14y ago
      I've been brainwashed by the article and is wondering what JS means here. IS or JS?
• kristianc 14y ago
  The front page of Wikipedia works remarkably well for discovery - go to en.wikipedia.org on any given day, and you are guaranteed to learn something new. Deciding that users want to see your overbearing minimalism and your 'sound-great-in-concept-meetings-but-shit-on-paper' designs instead of you know, actual information on the front page of an encyclopaedia strikes me as an astonishing act of hubris. The one piece of information given on the front page (the languages bar) is a nice curiosity, but utterly useless after about one visit. I'm sure the Swiss, the Swedes, the Danes, the Indonesians would also be delighted to find that their languages have been relegated to 'rollover' status. As for the article pages, too much white-space, nowhere near enough information density. Did it not strike the authors, "Hey, hang on, the article is almost invisible on this page after all the crap we put in?" http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/img/27.png http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/img/27.png
  • michaelfeathers 14y ago
    Google indexes wikipedia so I haven't seen the front page in years.
    • kristianc 14y ago
      That's not a good reason for demolishing its UX.
    • fromhet 14y ago
      But google search doesnt replace the wikipedia start page, only it's search feature.
      • jdrake3 14y ago
        To quote Head and Shoulders: "Bingo".
  • TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
    Why the Swiss? They speak French, Italian and German.
  • 14y ago
• figital 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:User_style http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:User_style (also ... the content is open .... ripe for anyone else to give this a go)
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• correctifier 14y ago
  The sub section branding with the small w and the large first letter looks really awkward. Wiktionary is represented by a wT, but having a T represent a dictionary makes no sense, and there is a similar problem with wikiversity. They also tried clarifying the Species and Source by adding more letters on the latter which is isn't very visually appealing and shows the limitations of this scheme. I also think that they add too much focus on the site wide navigation stuff at the top, which takes away the focus on the data.
• tptacek 14y ago
  You'd probably want any redesign of Wikipedia to start with the understanding that the front page of the English Wikipedia isn't WWW.WIKIPEDIA.ORG, it's EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG, and that that page is dominated by content --- most notably the WP Featured Articles, which are a core part of the Wikipedia community. Draw the pretty colored lines after you grok the concept. It goes downhill for me as they try to get more technical, redefining the way the encyclopedia is edited and organized. Drag and drop reformatting of article layouts? Really? Don't the best Wikipedia articles tend to be conformant to template layouts? Wikipedia is not Digg. It does not have, as its primary goal, the delight of random web users. They are doing something bigger than that. I'm also not a fan of the branding idea. First, they've confused Wikipedia with The Wikimedia Foundation. The two aren't the same thing. The branding they propose makes sense only for the latter. Second, they're trying to do that organic living logo thing that has become ultra-trendy lately (just read Brand New Blog to see it done well); "as Wikimedia evolves, the little lines in the logo will change". Well, maybe, but the relationship between Wikimedia top-level properties doesn't change all that regularly, nor does it meaningfully change depending on the context. Nor does the aggregate set of lines between properties draw an appealing or meaningful picture. Also the capital "I" in the font they're using is killing me.
  • estel 14y ago
    Anecdotally, the overwhelming majority of people who I've observed using Wikipedia go to www.wikipedia.com and then select "English".
    • ArbitraryLimits 14y ago
      Really? I've never in my life went to wikipedia without following a link from a Google search. I don't think I've ever seen the Wikipedia home page.
      • awef 14y ago
        Indeed, I can't say I recall its appearance at all.
      • 14y ago
• vosper 14y ago
  Typical "creative agency" - not proofing their own copy. I've seen this kind of thing so many times, and it baffles me that it's allowed to slip through to production sites.
  • aslewofmice 14y ago
    The last image of the US Map caught my eye. San Diego is not located directly below San Francisco. Come on guys, show a little bit of effort here and take 5 seconds to look at a map. http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/img/45.png http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/img/45.png I understand it's a mock-up, but it just shows carelessness. If I can notice it, it's just one less reason for me to care.
    • grendelt 14y ago
      I also like how there's no city marked in Louisiana. Of course, to their credit, there really is no civilization in Louisiana anyways.
      • zeroonetwothree 14y ago
        Or Missouri, apparently.
• thowar2 14y ago
  Criagslist needs their help more than wikipedia!
• dt7 14y ago
  Interesting proposals, but like Andy Rutledge's NYT re-design (http://andyrutledge.com/news-redux.php http://andyrutledge.com/news-redux.php) limited by the practicalities of implementing them. I don't think the Wikimedia foundation has the resources to do any kind of major re-design, at least not quickly.
  • runemadsen 14y ago
    I agree. There are so many of these "awesome redesigns" around that totally miss the point. First of all, design is not chrome. It never has been and never will be. Design is the combination of form and content, but all of these redesigns are 100% form. Content is always sacrificed in these attempts. If a person like Andy Ruthledge had worked at the NYTimes, he would know that a number of this country's best designers are working on that site, and it's not just a matter of sitting down in Photoshop to do a redesign. You should never lose readers for the sake of new colors. Not to mention how the nytimes.com is an enormous site with layers and layers of interplaying systems. Making stuff like this mostly looks like a young designer saying "this is what you should do", but feels like a young designer saying "I don't have a clue about how things work".
• jblock 14y ago
  This redesign assumes that Wikipedia needed simplification. I think that if the brand and experience needed simplification, people wouldn't use it or would be more vocal about changing it. The designers clearly have some layout and visual acumen, but this redesign doesn't fully grasp the magnitude of Wikipedia. Every layout is modular, and every pixel has to be fully thought out. The result here looks more like the-new-Digg than it should.
  • mikecane 14y ago
    >>>I think that if the brand and experience needed simplification, people wouldn't use it or would be more vocal about changing it. Never underestimate inertia. Plus, it's looked like that for so long, does anyone think it ever will change?
• mbrubeck 14y ago
  Proposed Wikipedia logo: http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/img/4.png http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/img/4.png Actual WordPress logo: http://s.wordpress.org/about/images/logos/wordpress-logo-stacked-rgb.png http://s.wordpress.org/about/images/logos/wordpress-logo-sta... (It's not just that both are W's -- they also chose a typeface with a similar distinctive swoosh.)
  • mvzink 14y ago
    Yeah, I would be in favor of keeping the existing font face and W.
  • nnash 14y ago
    >the letter W, which is/could be the most famous W in the whole web. W is enough for Wikipedia to be recognized. I read this and thought the same thing, "What about Wordpress?"
    • sanjiallblue 14y ago
      Wordpress isn't very well-known by the general public. I mean hell, it's not even in the same ballpark compared to Wikipedia.
      • mbrubeck 14y ago
        It's closer than you might guess. According to Alexa statistics (which I know aren't perfect), WordPress.com is one of the top 20 web sites in the entire world, even though it is visited by "only" 4% to 5% of all Internet users each day [1], compared to Wikipedia's 10-15% [2]. The WordPress software has been around for almost a decade, and although most readers of WordPress blogs might not recall the name "WordPress", they probably have at least some passive recognition. Each hosted WordPress blog uses the "W" favicon by default. [1]: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wordpress.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wordpress.com [2]: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org
        • 14y ago
• FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
  I don't know where they got the idea that a serif 'W' is the most recognisable 'W' on the net (as Wikipedia). I first thought of Waterstones (a UK bookstore chain), and then Wordpress. Even after that, how does it then make sense to actually change it to something else, thus removing what identity there once was? It's not like the replacement (with the Adobe-esque abbreviations that are meaningless to people who don't already know them) is an actual improvement. Otherwise, I don't really get the purpose of it. Wikipedia's not there to look fancy or show off designer skills, and I'd argue that anything that isn't pure content is just completely unnecessary for it.
  • mnicole 14y ago
    Exactly what I thought; Wordpress' serif W dominates the web and this one is far too similar to it for people to know the difference. People know Wikipedia as Wikipedia and as an international website, we shouldn't use a generic 'W' as the logo across the board.
• mvzink 14y ago
  Agree or disagree with their design decisions, I do hope they are right that "the discussion begins". Does anybody know of internal/official Wikimedia efforts/discussions wrt redesigns?
  • languagehacker 14y ago
    There is always discussion. Go to MediaWiki.org and poke around.
• dimitar 14y ago
  Its awful. It reminds me of the Gmail redesign. I hate these simplified, 2d websites. Why do you have to ruin every website?
  • SwellJoe 14y ago
    I like the new GMail, and the new post-4.0 Android 2D UIs. I don't like most of these suggested changes for WikiPedia, however.
    • TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
      You mean wikipedia? I mean, wP?
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• rotskoff 14y ago
  I feel like this redesign invests in exactly the sort of brand-ism that wikipedia opposes. These changes seem to do little to improve the actual interface, instead introducing an intrusive menu and pasting a logo wherever possible. That said, the connection explorer is quite neat and the efforts to ease editing have their heart in the right place.
• shmerl 14y ago
  Design looks somewhat "tabletized" with oversized controls intended making usage of capacitive touchscreens easier. Desktop version of the site doesn't need such oversized controls - they don't look pretty and unnecessary eat useful space. It's nicely done though for the mobile optimized version.
• waqf 14y ago
  I didn't even have the patience to read their own page because of their poor design choices (mostly, waaay too much scrolling). I'm glad I don't have to read a Wikipedia designed by these people.
• jrockway 14y ago
  It basically looks like a copy of Google's current design. Black bar with other properties at the top, then a big white page full of whatever. It's a fine interface, but I don't have much trouble with en.wikipedia either.
• EternalFury 14y ago
  Where is the Wikimedia theme/skin described in this showcase?
  • SwellJoe 14y ago
    This. Show me the code, or at least a github with the beginnings of making these ideas a reality, or you're wasting my time with mental masturbation. Until you can actually test these dramatic changes with real users and show that these changes can be achieved in a usable way, it's the height of designer hubris to trot this out as a major improvement to one of the world's most popular sites. Say whatever you will of WikiPedia, the reality is that 99.9% of designers will never build anything as useful to so many people in their entire career. That is a design success. So, while these "redesign famous site" projects are fun, I guess, and probably great practice and thinking exercises for the designers, I don't think the folks behind a site like Wikipedia ought to drop everything and follow their advice. Wikipedia has billions of pages to serve, and millions of people to educate.
  • insertnickname 14y ago
    It doesn't exist. They just made some fancy images.
    • EternalFury 14y ago
      Ah, then they have no idea if what they are describing is even remotely possible given the constraints imposed by Wikimedia. Making a theme/skin for Wikimedia is quite a task, actually.
• languagehacker 14y ago
  I work at Wikia, which means I work with MediaWiki every day. I was kind of offended by how naive New is New is being. I don't think they have any grasp on the sort of massive scope changes like this would require. Wikipedia is not MediaWiki's only consumer. A lot of communities that use MediaWiki are extremely conservative about the UI, so some of the conservatism is by design. The WikiMedia Foundation is working on a lot of the more feasible features already, such as the visual editor. I think it's obnoxious that a design team would spend two months on something without taking any time to consider implementation detail. The MediaWiki project is very transparent, and if New is New cared to learn about what features were in the works, they could have easily found them on the right wiki -- design mockups and all. Whoever would hire these guys to do work for hire will be paying for an intractable mess of a design with a hearty helping of scope creep. And don't get me started on the proposed Wikipedia logo. It looks like the Wikia fractal with way less nodes.
  • saraid216 14y ago
    > And don't get me started on the proposed Wikipedia logo. It looks like the Wikia fractal with way less nodes. I found it offensive that they felt the English 'W' was the only one worth featuring in the logo.
    • mbrubeck 14y ago
      To be fair, Wikipedia already uses a "W" as its favicon in every locale (even for languages with non-Latin scripts, like Japanese and Arabic): http://ja.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico http://ja.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico http://ar.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico http://ar.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico
      • TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
        New is New's idea is just to trash the well-recognisable wikipedia W, and replace it with a new one, with no good reason. And trash the icons for the various Wikimedia projects.
• dsr_ 14y ago
  Wikipedia doesn't need a redesign. It just needs to have an easy preferences setting for "I am a deletionist" vs "I am an inclusionist" or whatever the current preferred designations are. The deletionists get pared-down, guaranteed notable content, and the inclusionists get the mess.
  • SwellJoe 14y ago
    This distinction is only relevant to maybe 1% of wikipedia users...the heavy users who get involved in internal politics and editing decisions (and maybe the spammers who try to wield wikipedia's massive visibility for their own purposes). The average wikipedia user has no idea there are deletion wars.
    • wilfra 14y ago
      I don't think thats the kind of deletion vs inclusion he was referring to, though you are 100% correct. I think what he meant was there should be a setting you can choose to view a minimalist version of the site.
    • cabalamat 14y ago
      > This distinction is only relevant to maybe 1% of wikipedia users I disagree. I have looked for content on WP before, only to find it has been deleted by deletionists. I have also given up creating new articles because of deletionists.
      • SwellJoe 14y ago
        I don't believe any HN reader could ever be considered an "average user" in this context.
• TomGullen 14y ago
  I like the proposed design from the point of view that I'd be casually browsing it trying to find interesting information and learning things for no reason. But for finding out information I need to find out for whatever reason, it's just going to slow that process down.
• sazpaz 14y ago
  Obviously, Wikipedia is an extremely useful educational resource, and I think it's even more powerful in developing countries, which usually lack of academic materials. Making changes that rise the technological barrier of entry for many users doesn't seem adequate to me.
• dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  Wow that's ugly. When did minimalism and copying Google's get mistaken fir creativity? I'm kinda over the whole "hey. we're all cool people. let's get together and do stuff." design aesthetic. It was cute for a time but let's move on.
• patrickmclaren 14y ago
  Sent this email to them: " Absolutely terrible; increasing the signal/noise ratio, in addition to increasing unnecessary white space were extremely bad design choices. The purpose of Wikipedia is to share information. The changes that you proposed impede that goal by the addition of a step where the user has to "understand" the design, before they can begin to use it. You should have reviewed mathematical and scientific journals before you begun your sketch work. Those types of publications succeed at transmitting a high amount of information, very quickly. Bare HTML pages also succeed at transmitting technical information at a very fast rate. Rather than just stating that Wikipedia is in need of a redesign, state your reasons. The design of Wikipedia is not simply an aesthetic designer's problem, it is a problem that has to be approached from an engineering point of view: maximise the information communication rate whilst keeping the design aesthetically pleasing, not the other way around."
  • fromhet 14y ago
    Why mail it to them? We who hang out at HN may find it awful, but it's mean to smear it in their faces.
    • joestringer 14y ago
      I'm not sure it's intended as a face-smear; but even if it is, personally I'd prefer to receive direct communication with criticism than to find out later that there is a community mocking my work.
    • shenberg 14y ago
      You're reading it wrong - it's blunt criticism, but it's also constructive. It's not fun to read this, but I find it a lot better than someone saying your X is awesome while thinking privately that it sucks.
    • patrickmclaren 14y ago
      I mailed them based on a number of reasons: 1. Critiquing is an essential step of the design process, 2. They provided an email address at the end of the post, 3. I wanted to ensure that they weren't reinforcing their design biases that had emerged as a result of their 2 month drive to release their concept.
• jcfrei 14y ago
  I couldn't care less about a proposed redesign of wikipedia by a random design agency. but I do gotta give props to their marketing department.
• ilaksh 14y ago
  The biggest problem I have with this sort of thing -- actually probably the whole field(s) of UI/UX design -- is that there is no actual prototype but it seems like they are implying that the programmers didn't include any of those features because they didn't think of them, and that now the real work for the 'redesign' has been done. As if the hard part was making a bunch of pictures. So this whole thing really irritates me. Having said that, I think that modernizing Wikipedia or MediaWiki is a an interesting idea (although probably not a priority), and this is actually a decent starting point for discussing how many of the new (mainly, but not entirely, stylistic) UI/UX trends (principles in a few cases I guess) could be applied. I mean obviously their nav takes up more space than necessary and we don't need Wikipedia's logo to look just like WordPress's, but the minimalism, alternate typography of some sort, monochrome icon widgets, etc. are apparently now required in order to qualify as contemporary design. And the connection clouds and highlighter quote idea is cool. And it probably wouldn't hurt to remove one or two of the buttons on the editor or move them to an advanced section, or spend an hour or two making the editor looking more contemporary. In case anyone actually reads this, I have a question. Is the thing where buttons and controls are monochrome icons (and usually with no 3d appearance), is that going to stay? I mean, is there a reason you can't have multiple colors in icons now? Also it seems a lot of times you don't get labels on buttons anymore (I know, tooltips). How much of this stuff is likely to stick for the next 5, 10 years, or is it just a short term fad? I mean I coded a UI recently for a component platform thing I am building (actual functional software platform, not pictures) and it had multicolor traditional icons on normal 3d buttons with labels. This UX guy saw that and said I was 'completely out of touch'. So I took the labels, 3d and colors off the buttons.
  • nohat 14y ago
    I think the basic principle of visual simplicity is going to stick around. I do think there's some faddish elements to the adoption though. I like dropping 3d. Embracing the two dimensional property of the screen seems well founded. I doubt the monochrome is permanent: we can simply convey more information with color. I'm conflicted on the lack of labels. They are undoubtedly useful, but do visually clutter the screen. To speculate I suspect that if eye tracking come into wide usage tooltip like extra contextual information on the focus of attention could take over almost completely.
• wishfulcoding 14y ago
  > ...and decided to eliminate, ahem, everything except... …the letter W, which is/could be the most famous W in the whole web. Wikipedia is available in 275 languages, and the current logo at least acknowledges that there are other writing systems and that this is not just an English encyclopaedia. Changing it for a W is a complete disregard of the significance of Wikipedia as a multilingual reference work.
• umairsiddique 14y ago
  I'm glad Wikipedia is nothing remotely like that.
  • briandear 14y ago
    Yeah, I hope it stays more like Craigslist. Simple, ugly and functional.
• flixic 14y ago
  Oh dear... New! is a fairly... new.. advertising agency from my country, Lithuania. They are trying to become better known, so this is without a doubt a targeted publicity stunt ("Look how well it worked for Dustin Curtis to redesign American Airlines! I guess we can do something similar!") And as that, it's pretty bad. Not only did they showed poor design (in a sense of "how it works") skills, but also left a bad impression as a studio.
  • vacri 14y ago
    That makes it even more puzzling that they would put so much focus on having the English language dominate the redesign.
  • lallysingh 14y ago
    How well it worked for Dustin Curtis? He got a guy fired http://www.dustincurtis.com/incompetence.html http://www.dustincurtis.com/incompetence.html for his post.
• runjake 14y ago
  I see some Wikipedia people commenting, so I'll mention I MUCH prefer the existing Wikipedia over this design. It's simple and it loads quickly. I find this design gaudy and the gradient bars reminds me of mid-2000s ASP.net design style, which I have a particular adversion to. Just because a design has been around awhile doesn't mean it requires an overhaul.
• radicaldreamer 14y ago
  Clever is the enemy of simple.
• phmagic 14y ago
  Flat. More space. Focused on typography. Typography. I think designers are moving further away from form follows function.
• netmau5 14y ago
  "We hope you will find it interesting." Why the guillotine on these guys? I think they contributed something meaningful to the discussion. You don't have to like it to be respectful.
• werdnanoslen 14y ago
  Agghhh, it's like they're making it web-3.0-y with all the giant logos/buttons and a massive toolbar. I already hate sites enough that cram a whole load of fat things above the actual content. Especially sharing buttons. I KNOW HOW TO COPY A URL DAMMIT!
  • gddr 14y ago
    Just accept the future man. "Pyramid From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A pyramid (from Greek: πυραμίς pyramis[1]) is a structure whose shape is roughly that of a pyramid in the geometric sense; that is, its outer surfaces are triangular and converge to a single point at the top. Share "Pyramid" with your friends: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Google+ - Email - Pinterest - Tumblr - Reddit - Delicious - Digg - WordPress Follow Wikipedia on: Twitter - Facebook - Google+ - Pinterest" (Or you could get Ghostery)
• juddlyon 14y ago
  This is a smart idea by these folks, it's generating buzz for their firm and likely helped them improve their branding chops as they thought through this. I found the way they presented it deferential and respectful enough, why trash their effort? Of course these fantasy redesigns are naive and mostly impractical, but there may also be some decent/helpful ideas being suggested. Do you think Wikipedia is worse off for all of us discussing how it might be improved? I like unsolicited redesigns so long as the people behind them aren't snide or arrogant in the way they present them (I can see why the NY Times redesign irked people).
  • andrewfelix 14y ago
    I think it's a great concept. But if you're going to conceptualise a change to one of the most popular websites that is backed by an intelligent and active community you're going to have to expect some critical feedback. I actually think there is a bit of arrogance implicit in the redesign, as the designers haven't solicited feedback from the wider wiki community and made big assumptions about the original design.
• HannibalLecter 14y ago
  To fix Wikipedia you have to first fix their policies, and how they affect change site-wide. Make them more like a university.
• mikecane 14y ago
  Brilliant redesign. They should adopt it.
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• neilk 14y ago
  Every now and then a designer comes along and says they're going to fix Wikipedia. And those of us who've tried either are polite or roll our eyes.... However, this person has some legitimately great ideas. I love how the design is far more reader-centric. I'm not sure why I need a history of articles that I read (browsers do that very well these days), but the 'highlighted' text is a cool idea. You can start thinking about the site as helping you research things, keep a scrapbook of snippets. I love it. The front page redesign: believe it or not, the multiple languages are the most important thing to highlight. Wikipedia's global audience often uses that system to navigate between encyclopedias. They also often use Google to find the English article, and then look for an 'inter-wiki link' in the margin to an article in their native language. It looks like there's a lot of cruft in the design, and maybe someone needs to be very bold and piss off a lot of users and force a new interaction pattern. But this stuff is all there for a reason. The 'random article' button is actually one of the most popular features. Really! As for the proposed branding: first of all, the ideas presented here are not very good. It reminds me of the generic brands at the supermarket. The gossamer rainbow graph wouldn't even reproduce properly at small sizes (and if projects are added or eliminated, then what, do we change the logo?) But more importantly - the thing which the designers rarely understand is that Wikipedia and its sister projects are not products to be sold - they are communities. And they came to consensus on those logos. They're more like sports team logos than a unified branding system to sell something. That said, there is a system, of sorts; when new logos are made, they try to make variations on the red dot and blue and green shapes. Also, don't get me started on making color meaningful for navigation. It works for subway maps and it sucks everywhere else. Very bad for accessibility (color-blind people). And very bad for maintainability. The Russian Wikipedia is currently the fastest growing site; you can expect it to change position in the rankings soon. Then what, add another color? Should it change colors, surprising the user? Swap the colors in the rainbow? Lastly, this designer isn't even addressing the biggest problem we have today, which is how to modify Wikipedia for the mobile web. Reading articles is getting better, and we've been using the Wiki Loves Monuments annual contest as a way to drive the development of mobile photo submissions. But there's still no clear vision of how anyone does serious editing on a mobile device. As for the part where they offhandedly remark that we should make the site live-editable... HA HA HA. You have no idea what you're up against. I worked on this myself for a while. We made some interesting demos but they weren't something you could deploy. If we were making Wikipedia from scratch today, of course we'd do that and more, but the thing is, there are multiple challenges, and a whole lot of legacy to support. Technically: it has to serialize to wikitext and be uploaded as discrete changes to sections. So if you want live editing you need bidirectional parsing and serialization in the browser. Wikitext is unlike any other regular language and has a complex macro system, which consists of... other wiki pages. Stored in the database. Which means you need heavy database I/O just to render HTML. Or at least, a very extensive cache of page fragments. You also can't cheat with a simpler parser in the browser, because wikitext was basically designed to indulge whatever shortcuts the community wanted, and be extremely forgiving. Most wiki pages exploit at least one of the weird quirks. You can't even cheat by regularizing wikitext as you go, because then you're causing spurious changes that the community can't easily police. The current team is solving this with a radical approach to parsing that leverages HTML5's standards and a Node.JS based system. So eventually the parser on the site and in the editor might be very similar. Operationally: Wikipedia is a cheap site to run because it's basically a static site that you can serve from cache. But changing an article can be monstrously inefficient. There are some articles, like "Barack Obama", that would take minutes to re-render if the caches were empty. When you start changing the basic database model to be more 'live', the costs start to explode. But rather than drown in negativity, let me just say that whoever this is - thank you for throwing your ideas out there. Assuming this isn't just a resume-building exercise, get in touch with the MediaWiki developers. They need designers.
• andrewfelix 14y ago
  Wikipedia's current design has never impeded my ability to consume its content. It works. I would love some a image browser and lightbox style reference pop-ups. BUT I imagine the current build runs great on old machines, making it accessible to a wide audience.
• akandiah 14y ago
  That 'W' that's being used here looks awfully similar to the 'W' used by the company 'Westfield'. There may be issues with the trademark. http://www.westfield.com/ http://www.westfield.com/
• ekianjo 14y ago
  WOW. That must be the laziest logo redesign EVER.
• dgreensp 14y ago
  I hope this Adobe-like visual branding strategy of "we have so many properties/products, let's just make a rainbow period table" dies a slow and horrible death. See: http://thoughts.shawncheris.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/colorwheel_cs6-640x640.png http://thoughts.shawncheris.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/c...
• sonier 14y ago
  I would really love to be able to highlight and bookmark snippets. Unfortunately, it would likely be a huge back end change for Wikipedia and their servers would likely melt. It would be great if there was an external site that used content from Wikipedia and had these features.
• cabalamat 14y ago
  In the redesign, the body of the pyramid article starts halfway down the page. In the original, it starts 1/4 way down the page. This is not an improvement.
• jasonwatkinspdx 14y ago
  Design starts with constraints. If you don't understand the constraints, a redesign is just a fantasy. Wikipedia is heavily constrained by one thing: the existing mediawiki markup. That presents a huge challenge to implementing this redesign. Large mediawiki installs become brittle because users have a natural tendency to use the markup for presentation, not structure. Combined with the in markup template mechanisms, the tendency is toward a tangle of interdependent markup. Wikipedia's community does far better than most in fighting this with policy and consistency, but it's still an issue. Implementing this redesign would require not just working with some of the more difficult parts of the mediawiki code base, but also a laborious effort to rewrite a sizable fraction (if not the majority) of all wiki foundation content. That just isn't going to happen. But that doesn't mean design improvements on wikipedia are impossible, just that any attempt needs to work in alignment with the constraining forces.
• mgurlitz 14y ago
  It's hard to say what's going on with the font. Works fine on Mac 10.8 Chrome 22.0.1215.0 (http://i.imgur.com/QMfte.png http://i.imgur.com/QMfte.png), but not in Safari, Firefox or Chrome iOS (http://i.imgur.com/8FruE.png http://i.imgur.com/8FruE.png).
• rafudu 14y ago
  Worth reading: http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Why-doesnt-Wikipedia-innovate-with-regards-to-their-user-interface http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Why-doesnt-Wikipedia-innovate... Some interesting technical (and also 'philosophical') aspects.
• moe 14y ago
  Well, got to cut them some slack for effort. But the result is atrocious. This is exactly the kind of stuff you normally get when BigCorp meets CI-agency. Every single detail gets backed by an elaborate, esoteric justification, so everyone has their asses covered. Nevermind the horror that is the end-result. What matters is that "we made the button bright pink and 2 pixels tall because studies have shown bright pink catches attention and small click-targets invoke natural curiosity"...
• crafter 14y ago
  To the designers of Wikipedia Redefined: it looks BRILLIANT. I am so totally inspired. Thank you!
• kleiba 14y ago
  I'm using a netbook. I think without "Readability" I woudln't have been able to make it through most of their post because I kept hitting space about twice per second. From looking at their redesign for an article page (didn't care much about anything related to the wikipedia homepage, I never use it), it seems like they don't care too much for people with small screens either: about half of the available screen estate available to my browser would be covered by their menu thing at the top. I guess people with netbooks would be worse off.
• javert 14y ago
  Please just KISS. Why would we want to make Wikipedia clunky and overstylized?
• laconian 14y ago
  My Page Down key melted from being pressed repeatedly so many times. Fucking designers.
  • briandear 14y ago
    every heard of scrolling?
• mehulkar 14y ago
  J don't really care about Wikipedia looking nice or being more navigatable. J rarely go there to browse. J google a term and append it with 'wiki', click on the first link and 3 minutes later J'm done.
• testdfsg 14y ago
  > The homepage of current Wikipedia is overcrowded with display of languages, which overshadows the main functionality–the search area. The main functionality of wikipedia.org is not search, but showing a list of Wikipedia language editions. > Rolling over the top right corner reveals more options for languages. What the hell is this? Why would you use JavaScript dropdown? That's not how websites work. Just look at 99% of websites. They don't require putting mouse over something to view hidden content. > Quote serves as a felt pen. It can be an easy way to highlight the best parts of an article, just like in text books. This functionality is better done as a web browser plugin. Because then you can save quotes from other websites too, not only Wikipedia. > http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/img/26.png http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/img/26.png Where Research, Edit, Talk buttons disappeared? > Basically, there are two reasons to visit Wikipedia: to read or to contribute. Reading function is Research and contribution is called Edit. This layout is bad for reading. Article text starts at half of screen, not at top. On most popular resolutions (1366x768, netbook 1024x600) it's even worse, article text would start at the bottom of screen.
• shalmanese 14y ago
  For a look at what Wikipedia is actually of thinking of designing over the next 3 years, check out Project Athena: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-08-06/Op-ed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20...
  • thinkingisfun 14y ago
    Thanks for that. I never lost faith in Wikipedia, but now I'm actually excited again, yay. Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? :)
• egypturnash 14y ago
  J kinda thought this started out on the wrong foot wjth the chojce of fonts for the body copy. Jt only went downhill from there. J'm really not hot on the rebrandjng of everything as "wX". Thjs js almost as unjnspjred as Adobe's CS-era brandjng. Jn fact J wouldn't be surprjsed jf jt turned out that whoever made thjs page js a fan of that abomjnatjon. Oh and thjs gets even better: you know how thjs "redesjgn" seems to be all about makjng Wjkjpedja's multjple languages completely obscured? The people who djd thjs are from Ljthuanja. WHAT. http://newisnew.lt http://newisnew.lt
• amirnathoo 14y ago
  Love it. Ignore them.
• Honzo 14y ago
  Couldn't someone just make this into a Chrome Extension? I'd be happy with that.
• cantrevealname 14y ago
  Tip to anyone looking for a link to the Redefined Wikipedia so you can actually try it out: it doesn't exist. What they did is a design -- i.e., a document explaining their ideas. There is no working prototype that you can try out. (I was looking forward to trying out the Connection Cloud.) It wasn't obvious to me that they had a discussion about design but no actual implementation.
• damian2000 14y ago
  Nice effort, but they don't understand one of the fundamental things about content heavy sites the size of wikipedia - the vast majority of users never even need to go to its home page - they get to the content via direct links from search engines like google. Many these days prefix their google search with "wiki" as well in order to look on wikipedia.
• Katelyn 14y ago
  Wikimedia Foundation's Senior Designer, Brandon Harris, had a lot of insightful, interesting feedback[1] regarding the 'redesign,' (of which I happen to agree with): -It's completely impractical and does not take into account some of the most basic ideas that Wikipedia is and depends upon. I don't think it's very well thought out or researched, and serves mostly as a hypothetical portfolio piece for a design firm. For example, the fact that Wikipedia is available in multiple languages is quite possibly its most important feature. The idea of burying language selection within an incomprehensible color band (that will only work on non-touch devices) boggles my mind. - Many, many important principles are tossed away. Why do the designers change the meaning of the "history" button? Burying the revision history is counter to all things that wikis stand for. - Research into the Foundation projects would tell you that storing a user's browsing history is against the privacy policy - so why include that? - > "Sharing functions will be the same so no change is necessary" - except that there are no sharing functions. - The most basic principle of product design is "Know the product," and these designers do not. And finally, This is to say nothing of the exercise in 'brand manipulation.' The most powerful brand that Wikipedia has is the wordmark itself ("wikipedia"), followed by the distinctive "W" logo (crossed "v" characters), followed by a single puzzle piece, followed by the puzzle globe. The brand rework here throws ALL of these things away and replaces them with a stylized "w" glyph that is almost but not quite exactly like the logo used by Wordpress." But that's just my opinion" "If you want to have an idea of what the Wikimedia Foundation is thinking with regards to the future of Wikipedia, you'd be better served by reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-08-06/Op-ed* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20... [1] Brandon full response to the design: http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Wikipedia-What-does-the-Wikipedia-community-think-of-this-Wikipedia-Redefined-redesign-of-the-site/answer/Brandon-Harris-1?__snids__=50923403 http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Wikipedia-What-does-the-Wikip...
• justin_vanw 14y ago
  OMG, they think it might be a good idea to do a minor frontend redesign of wikipedia! More about this story as it breaks!
• karlherler 14y ago
  This design forgoes my second biggest usage of Wikipedia (and I suspect it's a big use case for other multilinguals). (My primary usage of course being reading and enjoying the vast content.) I often use Wikipedia as a high quality word translator. I study at a Swedish speaking university which requires that a lot of the written material I produce is of course in swedish. Whenever I'm writing a comp sci text and I wonder what in gods name a "morphism" is in swedish I just look up the english article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphism) and hover over the swedish language in the sidebar and voilà I've got a peer reviewed translation (peer reviewed because it probably has sources in both languages, in most cases).
• lubujackson 14y ago
  Agree with all the critiques. Interestingly, while reading through the redesign, I thought some of the new functionality they added (highlighting, mapping link connections, etc.) were kind of interesting. But then I remembered designers aren't supposed to develop new features.
• maximveksler 14y ago
  This feels hugely like an attempt to make Wikipedia look like a google.com side project. Bottom line: Personal Taste: I don't like it. Wikipedia is not Google, it does not crawel and select the best content, it hosts and distributes the most valuable content crawled by wetware during their life time.
• countessa 14y ago
  The single W just looks like they want to be Wordpress. Not my cup of tea.
• hessenwolf 14y ago
  To me, it is obviously just an experiment in design concepts. I enjoyed reading it. I don't agree with almost everything, and the changes to wikipedia they make are, in my opinion, fuck-ugly, but I don't know why we need to be so harsh on it!! It's not like they were trying to replace Wikipedia, just play with 're-imagining any website'.
• yitchelle 14y ago
  Is wikipedia __really__ broken that it requires a redefinition? I think what these folks did was a new UX/UI implementation. Redefinition would imply a new way of how wikipedia handles with the data. Not in terms of displaying or presentating the data but in terms of providing better analysis tools for the data (among others). What this folks did was more of a PR exercise to showcase what they are capable of..
• MichaelMcQuirk 14y ago
  LOVE IT!!! Had the feeling Wikipedia was starting to look old. Now it's starting to look more of a 21st century web site ^_^
• fiatjaf 14y ago
  Ok, now the logo of Wikipedia will be the same of a thousand other W companies.
• jermaink 14y ago
  Add a share button to your site :)
• hexo 14y ago
  I'm sick of these bloated designs which tries to solve an issue which doesn't exist in a first place! Please go away.
• johanneswagener 14y ago
  I did a very similar project a couple of weeks ago. You can see the results on http://ency.cl/opedia http://ency.cl/opedia This post sums up some of my thoughts about it: http://lolcat.biz/post/27368236760/ency-cl-opedia http://lolcat.biz/post/27368236760/ency-cl-opedia
• padrian2ss 14y ago
  yeah sure, you almost got me fooled, microsoft. this kind of remake is just a microsoft stunt to foul people to adhere to their ridiculous UI from windows 8.
• iansinke 14y ago
  Am I the only one who finds a capital "T" very non-intuitive for "Dictionary"? Likewise "V" for "University"? That part of the whole logo branding I found unnecessarily concise.
• hk__2 14y ago
  What is that font? “I” and “J” have same glyph!
• BasDirks 14y ago
  I can't take designers seriously when they use a font with that such an unreadable "I", and input boxes big enough to park a truck in. Get the basics right when you make proposals that are supposed to represent your skills and vision. There are too many cute ideas in this redesign like the upside-down "w" for "meta" and the LSD spiderweb logo. Do the colours indicate language or specific wiki? Can't have both, sorry. The designers have huge problems with proportion both typographically and in their whitespace. Even if they are just mock-ups, they can use some more care.
• jenniewong 14y ago
  I've added thousands of words to Wiki (mostly on pop culture) as one of its few female editors and I think it needs a friendlier interface to draw a wider cadre of contributors.
• jbranchaud 14y ago
  I think they copied the W from the label on the can of cashews I am currently munching.
• MisterMerkin 14y ago
  Wow. Just wow. The Microsoft redesign that was submitted a month or so ago was.. okay. But this is absolutely horrid. When they got rid of the nod to all the other languages it couldn't be saved.