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.
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.
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?
Why do people do this? They are, even if they don't realize it, yelling "FUCK YOU" to people like me.
I might actually see if I can find the time to code up a preview of your design and see how it handles 'in the wild', as such.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesigns
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.
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.
It works for me, in my context, on my screen, it should be fine, right? Well, that's not designing. That's cheating. You're skewing the content's use, perverting its value.
This point is worth repeating: design without a purpose is not design; it's onanism. Anyone can go spend a weekend playing with photoshop for hours to give free rein to their own "vision" and aesthetic prejudices, given enough familiarity with the tool --in a way, not too different from shopping or 'pimping' a car or what not. But an altogether different challenge is to design for users, the vast majority of whom one will likely never even meet. And that requires at the very least some empathy for the poor victims stuck with one's shitty and arbitrary design choices long after one has moved on check in hand --like disabling zoom, hello!?!??.
So when the OP glibly says in their manifesto[1]:
"I love Wikipedia. It's awesome. 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 would respond:
1. Ok, but try first put yourself in the shoes the hundreds of millions of users who rely on wikipedia every day and their whole spectrum of use cases, environments and needs; then
2. try locate the totality of your own experience within that spectrum; and then
3. ask yourself to what extent your prior notions of delight, clarity, typographic beauty, etc might be highly conditioned by the peculiarities of your own experience and environment; and
4. to what extent such acquired "good design" intuitions are really the kind of self-evident, plausibly generalizable ground truths about usability and human interaction you feel it's worth pontificating about.
This is wikipedia mobile with a new typo isn't it?
How do I do that here?
Sure, the font typeface is nice, and much better than original but that's about it.
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 http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Hanibal - the picture text is a tiny compared to the gigantic text - I can zoom in, but then the text becomes even bigger.
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...
No visited link indication? Is that meant to be some kind of a joke?
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.
No offense, but this creation is horrible.
> … custom formatting on some wikipedia pages might not look right. If you see anything like that, let me know.
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](http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/Ruby_%28programming_language%2...) to [Wikipedia’s Ruby (programming language) – examples](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_%28programming_language%29...). Also, the code example `puts"Give me a number"` is missing a space compared to Wikipedia’s version.
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.
On [the about page](http://wikipedia.moesalih.com/?about), “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.
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?
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.
Maybe some kind of menu button could be added near the search bar with the edit, history and talk links.
Last summer, I build a couple of MediaWiki skins; one based on Zurb's Foundation [2] and one based on Yahoo's Pure [3]
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.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page 2. http://foreground.thingelstad.com/wiki/Main_Page 3. http://filament.thingelstad.com/wiki/Main_Page
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.
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.
Kudos on actually coding up a completely working live preview though. That's not something I see too often with these kinds of proposals.
+ large, beautiful readable fonts
+ Search bar is a search bar and easy to find
+ unnecessary borders removed
- Could use a little bit more branding
- No change-language feature
- Zoom disabled on mobile devices
- Some elements needs size tuning
But... why are you leaking my information to facebook, twitter, yandex.ru and google analytics?
