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.
It's hilarious from the start - first thing they do is throw out the logo that incorporates multiple languages and says 'fuck you, we're going English for Wiki'. They compound this by then making all the various logos English-derived, so these guys have basically shouted to the world that they don't grasp the basics of their client.
They even propose a feature that shows everyone how much English dominates the other languages in other languages, being the colour bar. And if you want something not in English, you have to find the nigh-undiscoverable 'roll over top right corner' to have the language selecter appear. They're pushing really hard to make non-English users feel like second-class citizens.
Then they redesign the page to make content harder to get to by putting a giant damn banner at the top of every page. Literally a third of the page is the banner. It's a wonder they didn't suggest putting some 'subtle' advertising in or something.
This redesign literally made be laugh out loud several times. My main regret is that I don't have a marketing budget, because then I could ensure these jokers would never get any of it.
> Draw the pretty colored lines after you grok the concept.
There is nothing to grok. Imagine Google's landing page being chokeful of "content" including, most notably, the featured articles of random nature.
Your comment inadvertently demonstrates the problem with Wikipedia as it exists now. A vast majority of its users has nothing to do with its community. People come, they consume and they leave. Sad, but that's life. But still the site is built to favor not their experience, but the experience of those who is deeply involved with Wikipedia - the very same people who are perfectly content with how things are and who resist the change initiated by those outside of the community.
So perhaps instead of dismissing alternative views as complete garbage, it might've been a better idea to try and understand where their authors are coming from and why it is that they are proposing the changes.
> It does not have, as its primary goal, the delight of random web users.
But it could. And that's really the point of this exercise: showing one way that it could additionally delight users, on top of providing the critical functionality it already does.
Delighting users is one step up[1] from what Wikipedia does right now. Yes, they're doing something of fundamental importance to the human race. But does that mean that the software needs to be bleak, emotionless, and, let's face it, not very enjoyable to work with?
The homepage of _Wikipedia_ is WWW.wikipedia.org. They never said they only want to target the english Wikipedia. The Frontpage of the _German_ Wikipedia is DE.wikipedia.org, but that has nothing to do with the article.
The individual language front pages are still here. With loads of information density and featured articles and everything.
The beautiful front page for searches in different languages is very nice and certainly provides better overview over the different languages available.
The overhaul of the Editor is also a nice addition, although it should probably be coded in a way as to enforce adherence to templates. A challenge you say? Maybe. But most things worth doing are.
The highlighting is a nice touch, certainly useful for doing research, which is what WP is often used for.
They did not confuse wikipedia with wikimedia. They very clearly proposed a specific logo for both Wikimedia and Wikipedia. They were aware of the connections and relationships between the organisations and concepts in question. The title can be construed as misleading, "Wikipedia redesigned" vs. "Wikimedia redesigned", I guess. But most people using WP are not acutely aware of the difference and relationship between the two. So they decided to hook the article on "Wikipedia" because it's the more recognized name. I have no problem with that.
I don't like that "organic living logo" idea either, I'll side with you on that one.
Yes, the capital J is a bit annoying :)
Your criticism seems mostly superficial and I don't quite understand why. A better branding does not water down the content. "Doing something bigger than that", (which i completely agree with) is not diagonally opposed to beautiful design.
Agreed. But I like the highlighting, saving of snippets and history-tracking ideas. I would find that very useful for myself, beyond the "oh sweet I didn't know it could do that" but for real "now where did I once read that?" purposes.
Can you provide a link to the Brand New Blog or some additional search terms? I'm interested, but "brand new blog" and "brand new blog logo" Google searches don't seem to bring up anything relevant.
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.
I highly highly doubt that this is an actual appeal by them to change the MediaWiki interface. I see this purely as a publicity stunt / marketing move, intended to get their brand and abilities out there in front of people. And to be frank, I think they're being quite successful at that. UX/practicality aside, most of the components do look good. (though good parts of it remind me of Google, Quora, and other prominent sites)
(Seeing this site reminded me of the guy who did the Windows redesign work a few months ago, which means that the windows redesign guy did a good job marketing/branding himself too!)
Heh, that's very funny coming from a Wikia employee. "Conservative" is the last word I'd ever use when describing Wikia's changes to the MediaWiki UI. You guys have no problem forking MediaWiki and making drastic changes to the codebase (http://svn.wikia-code.com/wikia/trunk/), so why can't the MediaWiki project make drastic changes of their own?
I don't think they're proposing changes to Mediawiki, they're proposing changes to the look of Wikipedia. While they may be synonomous, one is the software, one is the organization that uses the software.
Wikipedia could change the template for their version of the site, without affecting MW at all.
Wow, I had no idea that Wikia ran on MediaWiki. I have usually avoided wikia wikis because they always seemed harder to use than Wikipedia. Now that I look closer, I can see the similarities.
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
You are comparing en.wikipedia.org with their redesign of www.wikipedia.org. Notice that the latter is, with respect to content, the same as their redesign: languages, search, and sister sites.
Secondly, in the screenshot you are looking at, the content of the article has obviously pushed down due to the activation of the “quote” mode. Honestly, I doubt you do not realize this and I can’t help but wonder what motivation you have to criticize their work so unfairly.
If by Swiss you mean Swiss-German, there is a wikipedia for that language group (http://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houptsyte), but I'm pretty sure most Swiss-German speakers use the German wikipedia instead. I don't know about the situation for Swiss-French, Swiss-Italian and Romansh speakers.
" 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."
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I'm not the designer, but recognize this for what it is - a thought piece that obviously required some fairly significant effort to put together. Some items have issues as you point out, but there are also some very intelligent ideas here and that was the point - to put something out there credible for discussion.
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.
[+] [-] tptacek|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vacri|13 years ago|reply
They even propose a feature that shows everyone how much English dominates the other languages in other languages, being the colour bar. And if you want something not in English, you have to find the nigh-undiscoverable 'roll over top right corner' to have the language selecter appear. They're pushing really hard to make non-English users feel like second-class citizens.
Then they redesign the page to make content harder to get to by putting a giant damn banner at the top of every page. Literally a third of the page is the banner. It's a wonder they didn't suggest putting some 'subtle' advertising in or something.
This redesign literally made be laugh out loud several times. My main regret is that I don't have a marketing budget, because then I could ensure these jokers would never get any of it.
[+] [-] eps|13 years ago|reply
There is nothing to grok. Imagine Google's landing page being chokeful of "content" including, most notably, the featured articles of random nature.
Your comment inadvertently demonstrates the problem with Wikipedia as it exists now. A vast majority of its users has nothing to do with its community. People come, they consume and they leave. Sad, but that's life. But still the site is built to favor not their experience, but the experience of those who is deeply involved with Wikipedia - the very same people who are perfectly content with how things are and who resist the change initiated by those outside of the community.
So perhaps instead of dismissing alternative views as complete garbage, it might've been a better idea to try and understand where their authors are coming from and why it is that they are proposing the changes.
[+] [-] pirateking|13 years ago|reply
This is the main thing I remember after reading what seemed like an otherwise interesting study.
[+] [-] primigenus|13 years ago|reply
But it could. And that's really the point of this exercise: showing one way that it could additionally delight users, on top of providing the critical functionality it already does.
Delighting users is one step up[1] from what Wikipedia does right now. Yes, they're doing something of fundamental importance to the human race. But does that mean that the software needs to be bleak, emotionless, and, let's face it, not very enjoyable to work with?
[1] See Aarron Walter's Emotional Interface Design as described here: http://thinkvitamin.com/design/emotional-interface-design-th... for a great explanation
[+] [-] hellerbarde|13 years ago|reply
The individual language front pages are still here. With loads of information density and featured articles and everything.
The beautiful front page for searches in different languages is very nice and certainly provides better overview over the different languages available.
The overhaul of the Editor is also a nice addition, although it should probably be coded in a way as to enforce adherence to templates. A challenge you say? Maybe. But most things worth doing are.
The highlighting is a nice touch, certainly useful for doing research, which is what WP is often used for.
They did not confuse wikipedia with wikimedia. They very clearly proposed a specific logo for both Wikimedia and Wikipedia. They were aware of the connections and relationships between the organisations and concepts in question. The title can be construed as misleading, "Wikipedia redesigned" vs. "Wikimedia redesigned", I guess. But most people using WP are not acutely aware of the difference and relationship between the two. So they decided to hook the article on "Wikipedia" because it's the more recognized name. I have no problem with that.
I don't like that "organic living logo" idea either, I'll side with you on that one.
Yes, the capital J is a bit annoying :)
Your criticism seems mostly superficial and I don't quite understand why. A better branding does not water down the content. "Doing something bigger than that", (which i completely agree with) is not diagonally opposed to beautiful design.
[+] [-] naner|13 years ago|reply
http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis-looks-...
[+] [-] estel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thebigshane|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwe|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcgraham|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] languagehacker|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hkmurakami|13 years ago|reply
(Seeing this site reminded me of the guy who did the Windows redesign work a few months ago, which means that the windows redesign guy did a good job marketing/branding himself too!)
[+] [-] cmelbye|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saraid216|13 years ago|reply
I found it offensive that they felt the English 'W' was the only one worth featuring in the logo.
[+] [-] drivingmenuts|13 years ago|reply
Wikipedia could change the template for their version of the site, without affecting MW at all.
[+] [-] RandallBrown|13 years ago|reply
What is the Wikia fractal?
[+] [-] kristianc|13 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] adeelk|13 years ago|reply
You are comparing en.wikipedia.org with their redesign of www.wikipedia.org. Notice that the latter is, with respect to content, the same as their redesign: languages, search, and sister sites.
Secondly, in the screenshot you are looking at, the content of the article has obviously pushed down due to the activation of the “quote” mode. Honestly, I doubt you do not realize this and I can’t help but wonder what motivation you have to criticize their work so unfairly.
[+] [-] michaelfeathers|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aristidb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdm_|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mbrubeck|13 years ago|reply
Actual WordPress logo: 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.)
[+] [-] nnash|13 years ago|reply
I read this and thought the same thing, "What about Wordpress?"
[+] [-] pmb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvzink|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickmclaren|13 years ago|reply
" 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."
[+] [-] ilaksh|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Katelyn|13 years ago|reply
-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/20...
[1] Brandon full response to the design: http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Wikipedia-What-does-the-Wikip...
[+] [-] FuzzyDunlop|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] citricsquid|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jameswyse|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flixic|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lallysingh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runjake|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jasonwatkinspdx|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dmazin|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shalmanese|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkingisfun|13 years ago|reply
Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
:)
[+] [-] dsr_|13 years ago|reply
The deletionists get pared-down, guaranteed notable content, and the inclusionists get the mess.
[+] [-] dimitar|13 years ago|reply
Why do you have to ruin every website?
[+] [-] neilk|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] adam|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vosper|13 years ago|reply