The left sidebar has two killer features for me:

1. Finding canonical translations for technical terms. You need to know what the standard way to translate "hardware acceleration" or "differentiable manifold" is in French? Go to the wikipedia page and hover over the language switcher link in the left sidebar. Done. This has become one of my indispensable tools.

2. Learning about historical events where there are multiple inevitably biased narratives. For example, want to know about the Islamic Golden Age? The English, French, and Farsi versions have significantly different content from different perspectives (I would assume the Spanish and Arabic ones are also equally interesting). I highly recommend this exercise especially for history that one is taught in school, e.g. if you're American and can read Spanish, I bet the Spanish entry on Mexican-American War will teach you a few things you had never heard of.

I don't use it for comparing between languages much because I'm bilingual and my native tongue Wikipedia is not that big, but sometimes is really interesting to see the different perspectives.

But the second is a touchy area. In fact, Wikipedia's co-founder recently wrote a blog post detailing how its neutral point-of-view policy has flopped, in the name of fighting false balance. [1] His examples are pretty embarrassing, but more important in that Google points human "Search Quality Raters" to Wikipedia to understand "reputation" and maintain a supposedly even political bias. [2]

[0] Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter Kunststoff, of course.

[1] https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

[2] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... Pages 16-18

Well, it actually not that simple :)

Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter Kunststoff[1] is carbon fiber reinforced polymer[2]. But it seems like carbon fiber is also used as a short hand for carbon fiber reinforced polymer. Similarly, Germans often call Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter Kunststoff just Karbon.

But the translation of the technical term carbon fiber[3] is just Kohlenstofffaser[4] (which is quite a literal translation).

But indeed, it is really nice how transparent that is when looking that the wikipedia articles.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlenstofffaserverst%C3%A4rkt... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fiber_reinforced_polyme... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fibers [4] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlenstofffaser

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#Identity_of_%22Q%22

In practice, this need is usually satisfied by the Talk pages and archives. The published article is sanitized, but if you really want to learn about the controversies in the topic, your best choice is to dig deep in the discussions that resulted in the controversy being excised from the visible version. It's quite rare that the talk pages are also purged as well.

I’ve heard it being called just “Carbon”, pronounced with a long “o”, frequently. Since the translation for the generic element, carbon, is “Kohlenstoff”, and that word is very commonly used, the opportunities for confusion between carbon and carbon fiber is less than it might seem.

The GP (G-G-G...P?) post seemed to be using the shorter expression, but as a shorthand for the longer (as most people do) in English but not in German, which may have caused some confusion.

But it's the same in both (all) languages: The shorter expression technically means just the reinforcing fibers; the actual material used to make stuff is technically called the longer expression; but in ordinary usage most people use the shorter expression to mean the longer one.

Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter Kunststoff == Kohlen (literally coal but understood more broadly as any carbon) stoff (material) faser (thread) verstärkter (reinforced) Kunststoff (plastic).

> Since 2002, Sanger has been critical of Wikipedia's accuracy. ... [In 2007], Sanger again criticized Wikipedia, stating it was "broken beyond repair" and had a range of problems "from serious management problems, to an often dysfunctional community, to frequently unreliable content, and to a whole series of scandals".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger#Post-Wikipedia

Another bit of anecdotal evidence on translation: I recently wanted to find the idiomatic French for "electronics packaging." Google Translate gets it wrong, and there's no French wiki page to refer to. The source that came up with the goods was the "translations in context" snippets here: https://www.linguee.com/english-french/translation/electroni...

Deepl, from the same company, is much better and is currently the best online translator.

Or tell them on your gardening website to fill a chaudière to water their garden.

I'd hope that a person with Sanger's experience and insight would at least float suggestions, proposals, wish list, or any thing at all, to achieve something he'd consider more neutral, objective, or something.

everipedia.org I guess does some stuff differently. But if it has a different take on neutrality, it's not jumping out at me.

Sanger has some role with Ballotpedia? Maybe his vision for neutrality is there?

Just sitting here, I can imagine at least three different crazy experiments to play with neutrality. And I know nothing.

Also:

I was willing to at least consider anything Sanger had to offer, given his CV. But generally I fast fail (flip the bozo bit, summarily dismiss, shove into the memory hole) any media critic leading with "liberal bias".

I think he just has muddled reasoning. For example, his essay says something about Jesus, the Christ label, how the wiki is wrong... Or something. I was raised Christian, so I'm moderately inclined towards biblical navel gazing. But if Sanger had a point, it's lost on me. I'm just more confused after trying to parse his thesis.

Further:

I'll read any proposals for mitigating social media. I honestly can't even criticize whatever this is:

How to Fix Social Media in Three Easy Steps [2020/09/20]

https://larrysanger.org/2020/09/how-to-fix-social-media-in-t...

Non sequitur?

Especially when one of the main criticisms is "It's biased to say a false statement is false".

Sanger's fundamental misunderstanding is that a neutral point of view doesn't mean that the thing you're writing about is also going to be neutral.

It just now occurs to me that you're probably referring to the epistemological crisis. I don't actually know what that means, but please humor me.

Sanger teaches philosophy. To him, maybe there is no truth? Or that all truths are equal? Or something like that.

More than a handful of the geeks I've worked with were afflicted by the recursive discursive thing. Most bad was the philosopher software architect. Actually repeatedly debated metametadata, the data about metadata. I wanted to kill myself.

Tying this back to current events: It might be useful to have some canary questions, to determine the epistemological bent of the other participants. It's pointless to argue about facts if the other party doesn't believe in facts.

Some of the political ones show what is more easily described as bias, but his points about Global Warming or the MMR vaccine show exactly why "NPOV" for any extent is a bad idea, and why the new policy of "avoiding false balance" actually makes a lot of sense.

OMG yes I do this as well. Google translate is unreliable for technical terms, regional vegetables/fruits, cultural concepts, and lots of other things.

EDIT: Wikipedia is also good at differentiating regional variants of a language, e.g. the country of Laos is 老撾 in Beijing Mandarin and 寮國 in Taiwanese Mandarin and Wikipedia knows this. Likewise, a USB drive is almost universally called "U盤" in Mainland China but this word is virtually unknown outside Mainland China. It's actually a good way for native speakers to look up one-off words like this when writing documents intended to be read by another region because you really just need to replace a few nouns here and there.

Interesting anecdote: Linguistically, Serbian and Croatian are almost identical, except for the obvious thing that Serbs write in Cyrillic alphabet, while Croatians use the Latin alphabet. Politically however? Holy what a can of worms. "Inevitably biased" is putting it mildly, outright history revisionism puts it better, and it has been twice a subject of widespread outrage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

(in case it's relevant, I'm half Croat, and have a massive dislike against NDH supporters and any other fascist/fascist apologets)

So much so that I've made a dedicated tool for this: https://wikitranslator.github.io/

It uses Wikipedia's APIs to "click the language links" for you. It also displays short summaries of both languages' articles, so the translation can be verified. I know I'm a small sample, but I end up using it reasonably often.

See the tips at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638, especially the one about adding a comment explaining how you came to work on this and what's different about it.

If you do submit it, email us at [email protected] and we might be able to help further. And welcome to the state change of HN-commenting!

I use this so often, that I've thought to turn this into a full-blown tool on several occassions. A simple "translate" webapp that opens wikipedia (API) in the background, looks for the inserted term and then returns the translated articles (with links to the article!) for that term.

So "electronics packaging" would translate to "emballage/empaquetage de composants électroniques".

I know linguee.fr has been criticised, but check out these two analogous pages found via a search for "electronics packaging" there:

https://schroff.nvent.com/en/schroff/about-us

"The brand Schroff, which belongs to the business unit of nVent Technical Solutions, has been a world leader in electronics packaging for over five decades."

https://schroff.nvent.com/fr/schroff/about-us

"La marque Schroff, qui appartient à l’entité légale nVent, est leader mondial dans le domaine de l’habillage électronique depuis plus de cinquante ans."

This makes it look extremely like habillage doesn't just mean what you claim it does "in this context."

Emballage was indeed my initial guess for the appropriate French word, but I, you know, did some research before jumping to a conclusion?

Sounds like they're going to repeat that mistake again.

The difference of perspectives is also quite enlightening. I'm not talking about obvious transitory trifles like Obama vs Trump vs Clinton — it is pathetic that a free encyclopedia, of all things, wastes so much time on those, — or who's at war with whom for which reasons. I mean deeper differences in the world view. So there's some “highly controversial” (whatever this means) topic, and there is a completely regular article on it in other language, no signs of editing wars or flame wars, doesn't seem all that important altogether. You obviously start to meditate on why it couldn't be written the same way in the first language.

Just like many pop-science fans believe that the cardboard presented to them is a “real science” and the only true world view, most people talking about “approaching neutrality” assume that basically everything can be analyzed from the same common base, and, of course, their own beliefs are that common base. This, obviously, is not a good way to understand anything that belongs to a different culture.

Not just historical events. For example, Vladimir Putin's Russian page looks very different from the English page. If I suspect bias, one quick check I always do is to read the page from another language using Google Translate. Does not always work, but sometimes you get more information.

Exactly.

That's a great idea, I'm gonna do exactly that tonight. Thank you very much!

So people like myself constantly have to edit the "m." from wikipedia links to get the normal version. I really dont get why they are doing that.

(Actually found some info if anyone is curious: https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/w.... Though the article helps explain some of the context and reasoning, I don't think it really justifies the divergent experience and imperceptible progress on improving the desktop experience)

https://github.com/spixy/NoMoreMobile/blob/master/README.md

However, I'm suprised that this is neccessary for wikipedia. I guess it was more work to write the extension than to fix whatever is going on on wikipedias side. But then, on the other hand, maybe writing the extension and stop caring about what is going on on wikipedia is easier.

Secondly, there's discussion about serving everything from a single domain at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T214998 , which I guess would enable the normal mobile browser feature of switching between desktop and mobile.

For a long page, scrolling to the bottom might take even longer than just changing the URL. Yes, there are keyboard shortcuts to scroll to the bottom, but so there are shortcuts to edit the URL bar. It is, in any case, an annoyance that always(!) takes some extra time.

[Edit: I love that switching to the desktop version is literally the very last word/link of the mobile version. Even after the link to the "Privacy policy" and the "Terms of Use" that probably nobody in the history of homo sapiens ever clicked]

> Secondly, there's discussion about serving everything from a single domain at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T214998 , which I guess would enable the normal mobile browser feature of switching between desktop and mobile.

The last comment on this discussion is, quite ironically: "Have been somewhat expecting this to be fixed for the better part of 7+ years now. Hopefully this can be implemented soon!"

Except there should not be two versions at all and instead they should just make the desktop version responsive and strip out the bloat - I don't want an article to on desktop to load six different javascript files and have a giant banner at the top any more than on mobile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test is 27 different requests for me - that is inexcusable for mostly text content.

The work "discuss" does not show up in the source code, you can check "curl https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test | grep -i discuss"

The discussion is called "talk" on the desktop version, but it is also missing on the mobile one. Or there is some javascript trickery going on, but I clearly dont get it.

And this is how it looks in my Chrome: https://imgur.com/a/LQ7pmH8

You need to login and enable "advanced mode" in setting (in hamburger menu) to see it.

But this also means that every mobile user of wikipedia (I guess the majority now?) which is not logged in and enabled that feature (for sure the majority) does not even know about the discussion pages of wikipedia articles. This is super sad.

Mobile has higher latency and a small screen, so its important that I not need to make lots of request and its important that I can search inside documents. Both of which are broken by wikipedia's mobile interface.

If you speak different languages, the left hand bar is very useful to switch between different language versions of an article.

https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en

It would prioritize English result.

I actually have three languages of Google on my bookmark bar precisely because of this, and they work like a charm.

Although it wouldn't surprise me if some countries try to legislate about that and everyone with an international presence has to do it.

As is now I have to inject

    ['.vector-menu-content-list .interlanguage-link.interwiki-en', '.vector-menu-content-list .interlanguage-link.interwiki-pl'].forEach(el =>{
      if (document.querySelector(el))
      {
        el.style = ''
        let lang = document.querySelector(el)
        lang.parentNode.insertBefore(lang, lang.parentNode.firstChild)
      }
    })

I use the langlinks across many languages, way more so than the average user so my use case is different.

How would you solve this given the limited space? A label saying languages is the mosy obvious but real estate is a little limited.

I'd hope that if the icon was prominent in desktop with a label that would reinforce its discoverability.

Try looking at a wikipedia page on your phone. You could replace the 文A button with one that said "antidisestablishmentarianism" and there would still be plenty of space. It's floating at the left of an empty row.

I agree that the UX could be improved and there is plenty of evidence to support that. On the other hand the edit icon is super discoverable and used without the label so I think the challenge with the language icon is 1) there are not many multilingual sites and 2) the other icons there potentially cause the user to ignore them entirely.

Throw in the 200+ languages and longer labels in some of them and it becomes even more complicated...

Multilingual sites aren't rare at all. There is a conventional way to display a language selector: it's a button (usually a dropdown menu, if you click on it) with a national flag and the name of the language.

The big problem on mobile wikipedia is that wikipedia already has a well-established way to select the language you want to see the article in, and the mobile site completely removes it.

As I've said before the mobile site doesn't remove it. It just changes the mechanism for understandable reasons based on the medium.

Nice to chat to you.

The button is labeled 文A, which is quite common for translation service, and is just under an article title so it’s literally the most visible UI element. It’s difficult to make it more accessible than that...

This to me is a testament to the fact that most buttons should actually be text unless extremely common like the hamburger menu, but even that's debatable.

I agree, especially on mobile (even in 2020, many users — who often just got used to the hamburger menu — don't realize that the vertical ellipsis is a symbol for "menu" or "more options", it often just looks like a random decoration to them), although on a desktop website or app you (hopefully) have the option of hovering the mouse pointer (even accidentally) over any unfamiliar bit of UI gubbins to get a clue.

I'll note though that the specific example of "文A" is, in fact, a text label. The first Chinese glyph even translates as "text".

Only in the sense that those glyphs are used in certain writing systems. It's not text in the more important sense of expressing a linguistic message. It's just random characters. "文A" is a text label to exactly the same degree that ":-)" is a text label.

Note in particular that the Chinese glyph does not translate as "language". That would be 语/語. As you accurately note, it translates as "writing".

It's standing alone here. I'm aware of words like 文明 and 中文, but here are the 14 glosses for 文 in the 现代汉语规范词典:

1. (verb) to tattoo or paint patterns or words onto a body

2. (noun, literary) a pattern, particularly as of wood grain

3. (noun) ancient rites/ceremonies

4. (noun) non-military affairs (opposite of 武)

5. (adjective) gentle; not fierce

6. (noun) indicating phenomena of nature or of human society

7. (noun) writing

8. (noun) an essay

9. (noun) the humanities and social sciences

10. (noun) an official document

11. (noun) Classical Chinese (the language that is to China as Latin is to southern Europe)

12. (measure word) used for the copper coins of traditional China

13. (verb) to cover; hide

14. A surname

Most of these senses come from words that include the morpheme 文, not from uses it permits alone, but "language" is still not even listed.

A flag icon or simply some more explicit text would be vastly easier to understand for me, especially if it actually looked like an interactive element.

That being said I don't understand why the sidebar should be collapsible (and collapsed by default). It's just an extra click to access functionality with some people rely on (languages, for example, being probably one of the most used).

I hope we don't bloat up wikipedia pages with too much whitespace. Getting of borders, "minimal" looks bother me so much because they're sacrificing layout for aesthetics. There is a reason why borders exist. It is a line segment that separates logically laid out content into groups.

I want Wikipedia to stay the same even if it is not ideal. There is a lot of legacy and "learned" behavior.

We need to add the familiarization factor to any UI changes. The amount of changes should at the minimum exceed the accrued familiarization of the UI...the longer the design remains the same, the higher this factor. It is crazy to think that we should not make a change if it is for the better, but there are a lot of people ... millions that use this less-than-ideal UI. There is something to be said about that.

Typographically, Wikipedia pages have too wide of a column width. This is a common problem not just with webpages, but with magazines and newspapers. There is a reason why the dimension of a book (such as a novel) is smaller than a magazine and that has to do with how wide of a column is comfortable for reading. We need to look at how magazines and newspapers solve this problem. They use columns. Larger fonts is not the answer nor is excessive whitespace because you're not solving the layout issue. It is just magnification.

If newspapers didn't exist and if web designers today were tasked to design a physical newspaper, it would be bloody 80 pages long and full of massive margins and fonts with no understanding about density of presentation. The web needs to be treated like physical media (yes, I said that, fight me). It is a rectangular 2D space that presents text - no difference to my retina whether it is a magazine, newspaper or LCD monitor in terms of spatial representation (not talking about contrast/backlit aspects). This was different a while ago, but today, the pixel density is great and we can almost treat monitors like paper (again, not talking about backlit issues).

Web designers today won't be able to design a physical telephone book. It would be called "Too overwhelming" for the user and it would be insanely big in 17 volumes.

On the other hand, pages that stay in a narrow column in the middle when I widen the window really infuriate me, because I explicitly asked for wider columns and am not getting it.

The whole idea is that when you have the window at a comfortable width, the content in all your other tabs should also be.

The web is such a shit place in terms of design. This is probably why I like reading books and magazines in print. At least the lay out is done by a professional who doesn't have a title "UX/UI" designer and doesn't have a Behance/Dribble portfolio. These people are professionals and they conduct themselves as such.

Different people have different workflows. Many people I know only have 1 browser window open, always maximized, with a ton of tabs open in it. They definitely won't go about resizing the window for no good reason. I don't think any mainstream website relies on the user resizing the browser window for, what I think are, good reasons.

macOS, on the other hand, explicitly advertised having an "immersive" fullscreen mode (with a dedicated button in the past).

Wikipedia is difficult to read due to the small font and large column width. Even with the updated versions (I checked French and Hebrew since I can read them) - the column width is in the acceptable range, but the font is too small to be comfortable on a 4k screen. 14px font is a thing of the past. I see Medium, with their thinner columns and 21px font as much more readable.

Narrow columns make text hard to read due to the eye being unable to see whole sentences at once. It's like the "Dick and Jane" books of old: "See Spot! See Spot Run! Run Spot Run!" Books for adults aren't written like that (as print novels attest) and there's a good reason.

Also the largest "adult" books (non-textbooks) that I have take up about 1/5 of my 43" 4k monitors screen. If you aren't adding a healthy text margin, my eyes have to scan left to right twice as much as with a book. If you want to talk about novels - my screen is 8 times as wide as them, so they are naturally using much narrower columns than most websites.

The original idea of the web as a publishing medium was that visualization could be determined by the needs and preferences of the final user, and thankfully the technology still allows for it.

Again, increasing the font size is not the solution.

The second point about padding the sides with whitespace causes waste of screen real-estate for no reason other than to give comfortable width to read. This is what NYtimes articles do: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/business/goldman-sachs-fo...

So left and right sides are unnecessarily wasted. The solution I am proposing is to use multiple columns. At desktop size, you get 3 columns. At tablet size, 2. On the phones, its single column. There might be better solutions to this but I can't think of any. Columns are how Magazines do their layout of text. It is also part of the international style in graphics design.

Counter point: Magazines had to use columns to conserve space and page count. Each page adds cost. In digital media, we don't have such limits. The only down side is the user has to scroll a lot. But we have devised a scroll wheel and most users have this tool.

This is makes it hard to handle flowing content. Do you add artificial pages to break up the content or does scrolling cascade up each of the columns?

Then there's the issue of typesetting being an NP hard problem. Even Word needs a lot of hand-holding when using multi-column layouts because it often produces poor results.

I don't necessarily mind the excessive whitespace when I'm reading, because I prefer to not have to move my head and eyes too while reading. But having a lot of content on the page at once, like you're proposing, is really beneficial in technical situations, where I need to move between different pieces of information, like taking notes.

I understand we are just talking about page layout, but web designers still have to simultaneously contend with everything I've listed.

You mention a solution for 3 different sizes (desktop, tablet, and phone), but a responsive site often has to subdivide further. Even so, "tablet" does not have a standard size. Rotating a tablet/phone also changes the view size.

Size is not the only usability difference between desktop and mobile devices.

Columns in such a way would likely be hell in terms of accessibility (remember, the user can change the font size).

Of course, there are (potentially) ways to solve each of those, but they will depend heavily on the individual sites' and users' needs. This brings us right back to the issue of non-standard design across sites.

I wouldn't expect well-designed print media from a web designer any more than I would expect a well-designed site from a print professional. They are different professions and problem spaces that sometimes overlap.

Instead of disparaging all web designers as unprofessional morons, perhaps consider that they balanced all of the above along with your points and still landed on a different conclusion from you.

tl;dr the user can (rightfully) control a lot of factors in how they view the web that traditional print and graphic design do not have to deal with.

Somewhere between 80-110 cpl should be adequate to satisfy most deviations in sizes. This "buffer" factor can be accounted for when designing for resizeable interfaces. Column sizes don't have to be absolutely rigid and pixel perfect.

Scaling can be tackled by basing everything on em-units. Scaling using Ctrl + can effectively "zoom" the UI. The relationship between elements should stay the same.

None of this is difficult. We have tools to tackle these problems. Uninformed designers are the problem IMO, but I don't have data for this. My gut feeling is that most designers follow trends, UI frameworks (bootstrap, tailwind), and have stopped building CSS from scratch.

Why are columns hell for accessibility? Given the fluidity of 80-110 cpl, we should be able to account for any size from a phone to large displays. This is a solved problem.

Again, I am not saying there aren't challenges and may be there are better ways to handle all the variables. We should not throw the towel and not think, discuss and debate about it.

I'll admit I'm not up to speed with a lot of CSS, myself. I'll definitely be looking into how to better use columns.

While I think frameworks can be helpful to keeping a standard look and feel to the web, I would definitely agree that they're often used as a crutch.

By appeasing to many screen sizes, we create worse UI for all 3 sizes because no one really designs them for each size separately. Widths are in percentages, flex layout allos collapsable columns and the whole thing is not built from ground up. Either the designer starts with Desktop first and then mobile is a second thought (Bootstrap), or all class names are mobile first (Tachyons).

If we design UI from scratch for each of the 3 or 4 classes of screen sizes, it would be so much better. Completely, from scratch. Not taking the Desktop layout and collapsing the columns. But doing things like button sizes should be smaller for Desktop (mouse) and larger for mobile (finger). Not a single framework does this.

The first being screen size fragmentation. Most tablets fall into a similar size/scale category, so you can have buffers (kinda like how you were saying). However, there are still corner cases where (e.g.) a tablet in landscape mode happens to trigger a different size category. The fact that resolution helps in fingerprinting users is pretty indicative that fragmentation is a huge problem.

The second being the lack of a good way for a page to know exactly what type of device it's displayed on. There are hints/etc. to get close enough. However, it's still a fundamental truth of web development that the browser can always lie to you. Not necessarily a bad thing, but a design challenge regardless.

The third is less of a technical or even a design problem, but I personally think it's the worst. More and more, companies are making increasingly complex sites with no real thought to user implications. I believe this will always be true in a web where the real customers are ad companies and search engines and the user is the product.

On the lines of another point you've made, I'm not suggesting we give up; there are still plenty of ways we could and should improve designs and frameworks (you've outlined some really good ones).

Edit `const enableLanguageSidebarAltView = true` to `const enableLanguageSidebarAltView = false` to make it look exactly like it used to do before that dumb button was implemented

Editors do. The sidebar contains tools useful for maintenance works. Just to name a few, I use "What links here" to check links and redirections, "Wikidata item" to update metadata - these two are the most used features by editors: after contributing a new article, you need to add/fix some inbound links, and to link it to editions in different languages. Also, there's "Page information" to see statistics, and checking "recent changes" for spams and vandalism is a hobby for some people who need to kill time.

The current website works for me, I hope Wikipedia will keep it as an option.

1: Go to a page.

2: Click on an image.

3: Close the image.

4: Click the browser back button.

I am now at the image again. This is surprising and I cannot seem to learn this.

Uncheck "Enable Media Viewer" and then click "Save" at the very bottom.

Good news! The sidebar makes the paragraphs narrower.

But yes, that wide-text issue makes it incredibly annoying that so many HN users provide explicit links to mobile wikipedia pages in their comments. Don't do that! The mobile pages have bad readability in normal aspect ratios! If I'm on a phone, ordinary en.wikipedia.org links will redirect to en.m.wikipedia.org, but the reverse is not true! There is no conceivable reason to provide a mobile wikipedia link, and plenty reason not to!

This also encompassed the mostly ill-fated PediaPress system to get printed books of wiki content collections, the Collections MediaWiki extension,[5] and various back-end rendering engines that came and went (some without ever being fully deployed in production).

All to have a link that, in the span from OCG to Proton, was made mostly redundant by browsers implementing "Print to PDF".

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Offline_content_generator

[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ElectronPdfService

[3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/proton/

[4] Confusion over knowing who owns or maintains the PDF service: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T247310

[5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T256071

I hope I don't sound like a jerk saying this, but resizing the browser window is the key. I dunno why some people maximize everything on their computer - that's a really inefficient use of space.

I wish more websites wouldn't try to force formatting on me and just let me resize my window.

But you're probably on to something. I would be cool if the web browser would allow you to adjust the body size of the document without adjusting the window size.

I agree. Fossil mostly requires the use of CSS, but my own stuff I tend to not use CSS if I can avoid it, and often just write plain text files anyways (rather than HTML), which works well even if you are viewing them outside of the web browser, as well as with the web browser, too.

The mouseover popup/tooltip for links showing a brief snippet of other articles is so great that I find it irritating when other sites don't have it.

Pretty much every non-native english speaker uses it all the time.

I'm not absolutely sure but I think you might even be able to create your own user version of the sidebar if you create a suitably named user page. I'm not sure what WP sites allow you to do but MW has a lot of user customisation options built in.

Maybe that can be taken care of through themeing/browser plugins? If anyone has good ones to recommend, suggestions appreciated.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Reading/We...

No, it means the creator thinks of users as knowledgeable and able to take care of their own personal needs, and not as idiots who don't know how to use their computer's window manager.

Perfect example of the former? HN itself.

b) The alternative is not that people are "idiots who don't know how to use their window manager." I don't want to have to use my window manager. Manually resizing windows for each tab to get the right line length is a huge waste of time and seems idiotic to me. I want a professional designer to make it so I have the best possible reading experience on the websites I'm browsing. Because I'm humble enough to know I couldn't reach that standard by "using my window manager".

• Who wants to read four to five words per line? THIS LINE SIZE IS ACTUALLY UTTER ASS.

• In the good design, it was easy to resize to window to make the line length narrower. However, in the bad design, there is no recourse to make the line length longer.

However, the line length, while suboptimal there, is pretty commonly encountered — pick up a newspaper and look how many words fit in a column.

From what I can see, this particular change is already live in https://fr.wikipedia.org/

I actually use the mobile view on desktop for this reason. The mobile view will have white space on the sides if you do full screen, but I usually have two windows side by side, which results in all text, no sidebar, and a more minimal top bar. There is a 'mobile view' button on the footer of every page, or you can throw an 'm' between the language and base url.

Damn. I use that all the time. Wikipedia is one of my favourite dictionaries.

What is the most irritating is that they dont make some sort of really persistent cookies to remove the irritating mobile view.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VisualEditor

VisualEditor is what you get by default now when you go to edit a wikipedia page, unless you specifically click on the option to edit source.

Strongly disagree: Links shared by people with JS enabled now silently show the page instead of the image that was intended to be shared if the recipient has JS disabled.

Yes, reading Wikipedia on a 27” iMac is comical. Anything larger than 1000px wide is entering eye gymnastics territory. Ideally it should be around 600/700

I don't like how you go from a subjective assumption that no-one uses the sidebar to this, almost sounding disappointed that they haven't already done it. Or are you referring to some other data? I for one use the sidebar all the time.

I absolutely love that part about Wikipedia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org

I use it all the time for switching the same article in different languages.

I use it most often to change the language...

some are quite understandable, and some i can google translate.

for a multilingual person, that bar is indispensable..