> 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.
The Wikipedia FA's aren't "random". They're a showcase of the best articles on the site, and are p a i n s t a k i n g l y vetted by the WP community. Getting your article on the front page is a very big deal. The FA process is one of the primary drivers of editorial quality on the site.
> Getting your article on the front page is a very big deal.
I'm sure it is. If I wrote that article that is. If on the other hand I just walked in through a front door it is as useful as a book of the month featured in a local library. It is essentially a random pick.
> The FA process is one of the primary drivers of editorial quality on the site.
Hold on. So you are saying that if it weren't for a carrot of being featured on the front page, the Wikipedia editors would've not been putting as much effort into polishing the articles as they do now. This is simply not true.
I think you're misinterpreting your parent comment; I believe he's referring to the fact that to become a featured article you must go through an extremely rigorous process that definitely improves the article it's applied to (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_crit... ). You end up with a thousand or so articles a year (rough guess, I'm not active on Wikipedia) that have gone through some or all of this process, which makes a surprisingly large dent. Also, after being listed as a featured article, it's theoretically held to that standard in perpetuity (in fact, Wikipedia has a group of people dedicated to maintaining these). Next time you're reading an article that seems exceptionally well written and researched on Wikipedia, check its FA status.
The people involved create the content on Wikipedia. If it's a big deal for them, it's a big deal for Wikipedia as a whole.
(to put it in web 2.0 speak: properly incentivizing users to submit quality user-generated content is essential to any crowdsourced website, and few incentives work as well as the recognition of your peers).
Type in "WP:FAC" into the search. Believe me, it's more rigorous than pretty much anything I've eve seen. About 6 years ago I wrote the article on exploding whales, and this hit the main page. Now it's not even featured any more!
People went a little exploding animal crazy, if I recall correctly :-)
I did a lot of things on Wikipedia. Perhaps my most lasting creations will have been [citation needed] and the admin's noticeboard. Though I have, perhaps, a somewhat dubious legacy, it was a fairly amazing experience - rather marred by the manner in which I had to leave the project.
I've never once edited a Wikipedia article and have no desire to do so. I'm I'm the epitome of a Wikipedia outsider and I agree with your parent that this is not good design.
It's pretty and minimalist and trendy but it isn't Wikipedia. Honestly, they would have done the same thing with any website. It's just a shallow coating of gloss over what they've labelled as "bad design". There is a lot wrong with this whether you're an insider or outsider. These are my biggest peeves:
Not only do they throw up a huge middle finger to non-English speakers (something I usually don't ever mind but this is almost obscene) but they do it in a way which involves replacing the current system with mystery meat navigation. How is anyone supposed to know the color bar is clickable and not just a ripoff of Vimeo?
The logo... They explain why the current logo is what it is then proceed to basically say "but we don't give a shit, let's use cool fonts and be trendy". The whole concept of the world being a puzzle of knowledge goes right out the window and they carried absolutely no piece of it into the new one. Also, the "w" brands have one major flaw: Wictionary. Every other name is a compound word but Wiktionary isn't a compound word but kind of a half compound word. It sticks out and doesn't make sense like the others (had the others truly made sense to begin with). I know it's a minor detail affecting only one brand but good design is all about the details.
In the end this redesign amounts to nothing but slapping a fresh coat of trendy on a massively popular website. It smacks of arrogance and self importance. I have to say they damn sure know how to make something look pretty and trendy but the way they went about this, especially the subject they chose, made them look pretty terrible now.
> Imagine Google's landing page being chokeful of "content" including, most notably, the featured articles of random nature.
Yahoo's landing page is full of content and is useful for many people. Wikipedia's landing page is also full of content and is organized much better then yahoo's page. The majority of wikipedia's audience will google "SOMETHING" or "SOMETHING wiki" and read it possibly click a few links from the main article. A large minority of Wikipedia users including many who rarely or never edit or contribute want to browse "random" interesting facts possibly going on an info binge clicking dozens of links(leading to a tree of articles).
I'm not. I only ever use wikipedia the same way I would use an encyclopedia - to look up facts. I'm entirely uninterested in the community, just as I'm uninterested in the individual contributors to an encyclopedia.
The article makes some silly points, but it also makes some good ones. The front page of wikipedia shouldn't be mainly comprised of a list of languages - that's useless to most people. It should mainly be about search.
I've also never seen a "featured article" and am not really interested in using wikipedia like that.
>The front page of wikipedia shouldn't be mainly comprised of a list of languages - that's useless to most people. It should mainly be about search.
How much page real estate does a page have to have devoted to what essentially boils down to typing a query into a search bar and pressing enter before it's considered "mainly about search"?
It clearly cares about non-English speaking people, as there's many articles in other languages. As I say, I don't think the vast majority of people consider wikipedia as a "community". They consider it a place to find facts.
However, you don't dedicate 90% of your home page to 5% of use-cases.
Is it that hard to have a small dropdown language selection in one of the corners? I don't see why "language" needs to be the main thing on the wikipedia homepage.
Also I'm not sure going forward that language will matter that much. Chrome can already translate webpages to whatever language you choose with pretty good results.
I've been a part of the community, did daily edits for about a year, but ultimately there's just too many people who like to argue and enforce things (read - "delete shit left and right") rather than to actually contribute and edit. To each his own, but that community was not something that I would ever miss.
> "Imagine Google's landing page being chokeful of "content" including, most notably, the featured articles of random nature."
In the case of Google that is easy, since they have no content. Wikipedia does, and displays it (and yes, content, not "content", I have no idea what you thought you were doing there, but I saw it) -- along with a search field. So where is the problem?
> "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"
You say that is if it's a bad thing. It's not as if there was any content there if the site wasn't accomodating to those who actually help out.
> "the change initiated by those outside of the community."
Making a websites with some screen mockups, zero code and a huge font as to make the whole thing unreadable isn't initiating change, it's piggybacking on the success and popularity of Wikipedia.
I mean, yes, by all means get involved and help improve it. But just telling them from the outside what to do, that's silly. Actually, all the content is free. You can make a mirror of Wikipedia and implement those changes. Let us see a live demo, you know. Screenshots and the promise to check your email are cute, but it's kinda been done before.
You nailed it. I think that's the thing that really bothered me if not many others too. This is cliche now and if you're going to do it then you'd better make something really god damn good! This comes off like "hey, we can redesign a major website and get a bunch of notoriety, lots of street cred, back links, and look like a big deal in the design world". Major fail. The bar was already set pretty high but now that we've seen it enough times the bar is way higher.
"Been done before" doesn't even begin to cover the amount of spec mockups we see like this. Oh, you whipped up some new design and functionality for us in Photoshop one afternoon? Thank you so much for doing literally 5% of the work of your proposed redesign, please let me know where to send the cheque for giving us a huge amount of work to do that we never asked for.
> I don't think you understand just how toxic some parts of the community are.
Oh, I do.. which is why I know you're talking about editors, not coders/designers, i.e. the ones it actually concerns.
But even if it was true for all of Wikipedia -- so? What is making some mockups and a (kinda pompous IMHO) domain name going to achieve in that case? Even less.
This is a bunch of designers talking to a bunch of designers, on a page I can hardly read because the letters are so huge and the horizontally so restricted. It's either a clever joke, or can be summed up with "ouch".
This "redesign" is horrible for reasons that everyone gives in this thread. I agree.
There are some design changes that could be made to Wikipedia to make things easier for editors (and for regular editors) - see, for example, the wall of text at the head of some meta pages such as the main page, or ANI, or etc.
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.