> I noticed that the Wikipedia page for "Wikipedia" allows you to preview the new design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

The navigation frame on the left is absolutely massive. At first I thought you linked the mobile view, but no, it really is wasting a quarter of the width of the page (on my monitor) on white space.

The main feature of the new design is that the width of the article body is now limited, rather than unlimited as previously, under the idea that overlong lines reduce the readability of text. With limited text width, removing the navigation sidebar would not decrease the amount of whitespace. If you would prefer to have unlimited width, you can configure this behavior in the new theme or select a different theme altogether.

They tried this already in 2014 as part of the Typography Refresh™ package, but reverted it rather quickly after a backlash. Likewise line height changes and not-quite-black black text. Only the relatively benign font changes stayed.

Today the only reminder of it (a rather cryptic one) seems to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiSpeak#Typography...

Only if you create an account and log in, right? I've gotten along without having a Wikipedia account for the last 20 years, I guess now I have to make one. If that was a product goal, it was a very sneaky success.

I'm pretty sure that "getting the same four Hacker News users, who feel personally wronged every time a website becomes more readable, to sign up" is nowhere near the top of their list of priorities.

Grrr, I hate readability! Just the idea of proper line lengths makes me angry.

But I think everybody has to create an account, not just us salty grandpas. Like I said, if it was a product goal, it's a sneaky way to do it. Not saying that is the case.

Sneaky indeed. So sneaky, in fact, that it would be completely ineffective.

I dunno, I bet they get an uptick in signups, especially right after launching this design.

As mentioned in the above HN link, you don't need to log in. If you're annoyed by the logged-out approach of appending a query parameter to the URL, other people in sibling threads shared Greasemonkey scripts (or whatever they're called these days) for doing so automatically.

Just to add on this `?useskin=vector-2022` will show the new one.

Looks like the white space on the right side is a perfect width for banner ads.

It's also the perfect width to add a friends list or sidebar full of skeuomorphic widgets or live updating feed of edits to the site. There's no reason to assume Wikipedia would introduce advertising (they're not a corporation, they're not motivated by profit, they have a healthy chunk of cash in the bank). Of all the organizations I'd expect to give in to greed, Wikimedia doesn't crack the top 100.

They have been known for continuously lying in their banner advertisements for donations so I wouldn't be surprised if they ever finally sold out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

People keep making that claim, and yet when I ask for example of lying, I never seem to get anything.

Just asking for money while you already have money is not inherently lying. You might not like it, but lying involves making untrue statements. "We need your money" is not untrue, even if you already have a lot of money. "We need your money or else we'll shut down" would be untrue, but all of the pitches I've seen don't include anything like that.

I disagree with the very premise of this essay.

> Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn't it?

No, it sounds like running one of the most popular websites on the Internet requires well-paid employees, benefits, and infrastructure investment. 300 employees is two orders of magnitude fewer employees than Microsoft laid off this week. 300 employees to run one of the most trafficked and useful websites ever created is a strikingly small number.

Yes, I want wikipedia to have redundancy. Yes, I want Wikipedia to be resilient against incidents. Yes, I want them to have lawyers to respond to legal issues (both founded and malicious). Yes, I want them to invest in new projects that may or may not pan out into useful services like the ones I already enjoy (it's hard to appreciate how many Wikimedia offers).

If you told me that they spend $100M each year to keep the site online and running well, I'd believe you. A third of that is surprising because it's an astoundingly small number given the sheer amount of value that they create with it, especially for me personally.

> given the sheer amount of value that they create with it

Not a single cent goes to the people who actually add value to Wikipedia, i.e. the contributors and admins. They are all volunteers.

The only work that Wikimedia does is keeping the servers on, which is not work for many people, certainly not more than a few.

You have a wildly distorted view of what it takes to keep the lights on for a heavily trafficked website. All of the people you mentioned might be volunteers, but they only volunteer because the platform exists and works well. And it continues to exist and continues to work well because people are paid to do it.

And if you disagree with that, then where are all the top 1000 websites that are run by "a few" people?

What? How much work do you think it is to run a HTTP server that serves static content in a datacenter? I've ran moderately popular websites before and it's zero work most of the time.

In 2005, Wikipedia ran on $5000 with one employee and over a billion views just fine. People did, in fact, contribute to it despite money not being thrown into mud.

> And if you disagree with that, then where are all the top 1000 websites that are run by "a few" people?

Where are all the static HTTP websites that are ran by dozens of people? At most SaaS companies, keeping the lights on for the HTTP server is the least work you do.

Your view of the world seems strongly distorted by zealous belief in FAANG overstaffing.

> run a HTTP server that serves static content in a datacenter

It's not static content!

> I've ran moderately popular websites before and it's zero work most of the time.

I run a service that gets ten million requests on a bad day. There's almost always work to be done.

> Where are all the static HTTP websites that are ran by dozens of people?

Most static websites don't allow anyone to sign up for an account and mutate the content.

> At most SaaS companies, keeping the lights on for the HTTP server is the least work you do.

Most SaaS companies aren't serving a multi-terabyte mutable dataset to billions of people a month. They also aren't dealing with tens of millions of pages of user-generated content. Or a huge volume of legal requests because of all of their user-generated content.

> zealous belief in FAANG overstaffing.

Which FAANG company has only 300 employees?

Seriously, 23 billion page views per day. That's like if each of their employees oversaw a service that got 76M page views per day. That's a quarter million page views (not requests!) Per second. Half a billion pages on Wikipedia alone: that's a few million pages per employee.

If they wanted to add banner ads, they could have just done so on the old design. The existence of a new design has no implications there.

It may not imply that they intend to add ads, but having that space already there makes it more likely.

Presumably that depends on your monitor size

yeah I use Wikipedia zoomed in and it always uses the entire width of my screen, new design is not an exception. Having text as a max-width column is good, otherwise it's harder to read.

Or, more optimistically: the perfect width to display footnotes and citations. Like how Gwern's site does it: https://www.gwern.net/Sidenotes