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.

Not sure how well they thought this out. They seem o have taken their own design brief, bu not consulted with Wikipedians!

Best this could be would be an iPad app. Not for the main site(s).

Despite the historical use of "history" on WikiPedia, I'd rather it be called "Revisions." Revisions is much clearer as a concept.

> Not sure how well they thought this out. They seem o have taken their own design brief, bu not consulted with Wikipedians!

I'm not a Wikipedian (I assume that's what contributors refer to themselves as?), but I'd welcome some more personalization into the site. It'd be wonderful for me to be able to easily see the pages I've viewed, and be able to highlight and keep track of things in much the same way that I could in a real set of encyclopedias. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be within WikiPedia itself--at least not for me, but I'm sure the masses would like the same sort of features, and they'd be more willing to just create an account on WikiPedia than to install some third party app/plugin/etc.

Let's face it, English is the universal language.

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.

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.

Giving people something to strive for helps define what it is to succeed.

(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).

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.

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.

Yes, that irked me too, amongst other things. But intriguingly, they are from Lithuania, where Vikipedija does not start with a W.

So, your thinking is that Wikipedia should be more like YouTube comments.

In the words of John Lennon, "Well, you know..."

Their reasonably desires do not prevent the end result being a dog's breakfast.

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).

If you use Wikipedia only as a search engine, you are missing out.

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.

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"?

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.

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.

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.

This is the main thing I remember after reading what seemed like an otherwise interesting study.

I'm a fan of the minimalism but as high caliber as I was expecting.

http://www.minimallyminimal.com/ is one of my favorites.

"We check our mail dozen times a day."

No. We check our mail a dozen times a day.

Seeing the number of possessive its with an apostrophe on HN I can cope with someone using English as a second language making a minor grammar error.

First impressions are very important; I too find copy errors an indication of an inadequate effort to communicate effectively. However, that doesn't validate a malicious attempt to bash the writer(s) when a simple correction would have sufficed.

Asides from that, why post a correction here? Only other HN readers are going to see it, which inherently means you aren't writing the comment in the hopes of them fixing it, but to show the error to other commenters. Perhaps malicious was the wrong term, but your comment certainly wasn't trying to help them improve their copy.

* Check that your font doesn't do anything crazy, like make "I" look like "J" - come on, the sixth word on the page looks like it has a spelling mistake

* Check your grammar. I know it's pernickety but if I'm hiring a designer I expect attention to detail, and if someone doesn't get someone to cast a cursory glance over their work before inviting thousands of people to look at it, what does that say about how much effort and pride they put into their work?

* Check your spelling, I saw at least one fairly basic mistake (for rationale see above)

Personally, I don't care for it...

The rest, yeah, I agree with you. Get someone that speaks the language to spell and grammar check.

The reality is that if something isn't written well, the design is not going to wow me by itself. Good writing is a requirement, not an option, for great sites.

That said, I agree the redesign is misguided. But it's certainly gotten them some attention.

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

The delight is in the speed at which I can quickly explore and consume human knowledge. Nothing I've seen in terms of graphical suggestions would improve that - only distract or prevent my friends in other countries from being able to use it properly.

To me, Wikipedia is embodiment of "less is more", which supposedly all of these hotshot designers are supposed to subscribe to, but apparently mistranslate it to "a metric butt-load of negative space".

These guys did that with this brief. It's not the right answer, but it does raise some interesting questions. How do you design a more delightful Wikipedia without damaging the content? Because surely you agree that certain elements of Wikipedia - like editing pages, for instance - could use a good bit of delight here and there.

Amazon has (sorry for anyone who works there) hideous design. HIDEOUS. It is a very popular website.

There are dozens of examples of websites with bad design that are popular. Many web-forums have thousands, tens of thousands, of users yet are really hard to use.

Great design already, with a few rough edges. Nothing that needs a fundamental overhaul. I would hate to see Wikipedia go the way of Digg!

Advertising campaigns-in-disguise do not.

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.

http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis-looks-...

I still think it should remain mostly as it is, though. I didn't like their changes to it.

  * Go to wikipedia.org
  * Try to ignore the glut of language names and find the tiny search box
  * Search

I think I can support an idea that would hope to turn otherwise passive consumers into not-so-much-any-longer passive consumers. As long as pseudonyms remain acceptable.

If you think highlighting and bookmarking of Wikipedia articles is extremely valuable --- and maybe it is! --- go start a site backed by Wikipedia's content. In the places where it actually counts, Wikipedia has bent over backwards to be helpful to developers.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that, given infinite time, they will have to fight all these fires eventually. To delay the inevitable by not actively encouraging user registration is a disservice to the entire editorial platform.

* Blanking a page, or part of a page, is an action that any editor can perform, and any editor can undo. This hides content from the "live" page, but anyone can view the blanked content by looking in the page's history. * Deleting a page is an action limited to administrators, and similarly, only an admin can undelete a page. A deleted page is basically treated by MediaWiki like it doesn't exist, and only admins can view the deleted content. Individual edits can also be deleted, but this is not as common. * Lastly, oversighting can be used to hide content from even admins. Admins can oversight stuff as well, and in these cases, the oversighted content can be viewed by other admins, though it requires more work than viewing deleted stuff. For oversighted content to be hidden even from admins, the oversighting must be done by another user group called (aptly enough) oversighters. In the context of WMF project, entry to this usergroup is tightly controlled (seriously, it makes the request for adminship process look like an open door), and anyone selected for the role must personally confirm their identity to the WMF.

The main point is that, in all of these cases, the content is never gone, but simply hidden; the MediaWiki software is designed so that every action is logged and can be reversed.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Athena

Can a 3rd party even maintain a fully up to date set of wikipedia content? Not sure what their policy on scraping is?

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Query

For example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revi...

brings back:

   { 
     "query": { 
       "pages": {
         "1666533": {
           "pageid": 1666533, 
           "ns": 0, 
           "title": "Y Combinator (company)", 
           "revisions": [
             {
               "*": "{{Infobox company\n| company_name = Y Combinator\n 
                     [...redacted full wikitext content of article...]"
             }
           ]
         }
       }
     }
   }

One problem I've found with the dump is that you still need to render it (unless someone knows of another dump) which has caused us a few problems with the current thing I'm working on.

(Ok, yes, a browser add-on would be better for someone like me. But I don't think my need is very unique.)

But more to the point, the plugin wouldn't make it Wikipedia-only. Doing research involves more than Wikipedia.

Here is (roughly) what I learned in elementary school (in Bavaria): http://i.imgur.com/LbQ7l.png

I think the J dropping below the baseline isn’t particularly uncommon or unique. (I know quite a few famous typefaces in which the J drops below the baseline: Baskerville Old Face, Lucida Grande, Palatino, Rockwell, Optima, …) However, the I looking like a J certainly is, at least in print.