It's pretty but the lack of borders around boxes makes some articles hard to follow. Look at this for example:
<a href="http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Hyperbolic_function" rel="nofollow">http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Hyperbolic_function</a><p>There are many people doing redesigns for websites and games, and they usually end up making things prettier while not improving user experience or even making it worse. So my humble request to everyone making these is to try to address the usability issues a site might have, and don't concentrate too much on the superficial look of the site.
IDK, I think people tend to ignore the virtues of Wikipedia's design. It's actually really well thought out. It may not be pretty, or hip, but as far as utility goes it's hard to find a site that can beat it.<p>Think about how people use Wikipedia: scanning for one specific bit of information. Normal users see 90% of the information on the page as un-useful, why should meta info matter.<p>Overall, I think their biggest virtue is consistency, even though it's changed over the years, a user generally knows where to find what she's looking for. That's the purpose of good design, is it not?
I hope I'm not hijacking this thread in any way by posting a link to my Wikipedia redesign attempt. It's not actual code - just a visual mock-up. I posted it a while ago to Hacker News but would love to hear feedback<p><a href="http://www.interfacesketch.com/wikipedia/" rel="nofollow">http://www.interfacesketch.com/wikipedia/</a>
I will just leave this here, since a lot of the comments are basically echoing Wikipedia's official stance on the subject:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesigns" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesigns</a>
From the "about" page[0]:<p><i>But it deserves a better and more delightful design. This is my vision of how the reading experience should be like. Better typography, removed side bar, reduced clutter, improved contrast and clarity, and more open space.</i><p>By removing these useful elements, it's actually made the general experience of a web site worse. These things are needed in one form or another to make a website usable as a site and not just a page.<p>[0]: <a href="http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/?about" rel="nofollow">http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/?about</a>
again?!<p>This is wikipedia mobile with a new typo isn't it?<p><a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_news" rel="nofollow">http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_news</a>
A copy of an email I sent to the designer, “A few notes about your Wikipedia redesign”:<p>> … custom formatting on some wikipedia pages might not look right. If you see anything like that, let me know.<p>The formatting of highlighted code examples is not right. Sometimes there is extra indentation at the beginning, and the syntax highlighting is always missing. For example, compare [your Ruby (programming language) – examples](<a href="http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Ruby_%28programming_language%29#Examples" rel="nofollow">http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Ruby_%28programming_language%2...</a>) to [Wikipedia’s Ruby (programming language) – examples](<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_%28programming_language%29#Examples" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_%28programming_language%29...</a>). Also, the code example `puts"Give me a number"` is missing a space compared to Wikipedia’s version.<p>There is too big a difference between the font sizes of normal text and of code blocks. In the site, code blocks are at a readable font size while main text is overly big, and when I zoom out to 80% to make the main text more comfortable, code block text is now too small. Picture captions and infoboxes also have this problem, to a lesser extent.<p>On [the about page](<a href="http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/?about" rel="nofollow">http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/?about</a>), “email me” should be a link to “mailto:moe.salih@gmail.com”, so we don’t have to go to your personal website and find the link in the footer.
No, not another follower of "things are difficult, let's make them simple, modern and nice" camp. Will people learn that removing stuff from the product doesn't make it simple, but simplistic? Removing features (changing languages, wikimedia/wikiquote links) is not an improvement.<p>Sure, the font typeface is nice, and much better than original but that's about it.<p>Why is the text so damn huge? I know how to use zoom, thank you very much. Actually, you even broke that - take a look at timeline image of <a href="http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Hanibal" rel="nofollow">http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Hanibal</a> - the picture text is a tiny compared to the gigantic text - I can zoom in, but then the text becomes even bigger.<p>A lot of whitespace and removing virtually all the colors makes the page look very sterile. Remove scrollbar, make the links indistinguishable from text and you have a Metro/Modern(R)(TM) app. I still wonder how much brain damage the designer of that style suffers from...<p>No visited link indication? Is that meant to be some kind of a joke?<p>Obviously in some designers' minds (including yours) cleaner = better. But it's not! Wikipedia is not the award-winning oh-my-god-it-looks-so-nice page. No it's very very functional and easy to read. All those vertical lines, boxes and bars add structure and visual cues to the text and make it much easier to read. Thank you for taking it away.<p>No offense, but this creation is horrible.
Why is the font so large?<p>All browsers have the ability to configure the font to whatever the user desires. Why does this site override the user's preferences, and make the body text larger?
I think that the edit button is an important part of wikipedia.<p>Maybe some kind of menu button could be added near the search bar with the edit, history and talk links.
Personally I don't think it improves on the usability and I find the font too large, meaning that I feel like I have minor tunnel vision compared to normal Wikipedia.<p>The only part of normal Wikipedia pages that I normally never touch is the sidebar with the different languages. I don't think I hardly ever click on anything there. It would make sense for my usage at least for the sidebar to be hidden by default.
I actually like the redesign, it is cleaner and less distracting when I read. It does need some edge cases handled though. For instance, look at Russia's flag: <a href="http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Russia" rel="nofollow">http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Russia</a> vs <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia</a>
This is a really interesting approach - and I concur w/ elsen - it's not that far from wikipedia's current mobile implementation [1]<p>Last summer, I build a couple of MediaWiki skins; one based on Zurb's Foundation [2] and one based on Yahoo's Pure [3]<p>Both of these projects showed me many of the non-obvious challenges in redesigning Wikipedia; tabs, tables, and editor come to mind immediately. Cascading a new look&feel down to common (and uncommon) extensions is, of course, it's own level of effort.<p>1. <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page</a>
2. <a href="http://foreground.thingelstad.com/wiki/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http://foreground.thingelstad.com/wiki/Main_Page</a>
3. <a href="http://filament.thingelstad.com/wiki/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http://filament.thingelstad.com/wiki/Main_Page</a>
This would work well as a userstyle for Wikipedia if it were available. The type is far too large though, I needed to zoom out about 50% for comfort.<p>Compare a featured article seen on the front page in the mobile version of Wikipedia [1], with this site's style [2]. The mobile version keeps the text smaller and narrower, making for easier desktop reading. There ultimately isn't much this new style improves upon though.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Joy" rel="nofollow">http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Joy</a><p>[2] <a href="http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Cyclone_Joy" rel="nofollow">http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Cyclone_Joy</a>
I do like clean minimalism, but I'm not sure it works on a site like Wikipedia. The NYTimes recent redesign was a pretty good meld of minimalism around the article but retaining functionality.<p>I fear that your design kind of strips away a whole ton of functionality and with something like Wikipedia functionality is infinitely more important than design.<p>Kudos on actually coding up a completely working live preview though. That's not something I see too often with these kinds of proposals.
There are still some rough edges, but definitely one of the best redesigns I have seen.<p>+ large, beautiful readable fonts<p>+ Search bar is a search bar and easy to find<p>+ unnecessary borders removed<p>- Could use a little bit more branding<p>- No change-language feature<p>- Zoom disabled on mobile devices<p>- Some elements needs size tuning
Typography is good, but text with lots of links in it is difficult to read: the low weight font and the blue color doesn't work on the pure-white background. Maybe slightly darker color for links or a little bolder?