Wikipedia gets an update, first one in a decade

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Originally published at: Wikipedia gets an update, first one in a decade | Boing Boing

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This is an excellent redesign. It looks almost the same as before, and all the improvements make the site more useful.

That’s what happens when your motto isn’t “move fast and break things”.

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Agreed. I get so sick of ‘let’s make new shiny’ updates that break my workflow and make it harder for me to do stuff. Redesign that improves functionality is always the best.

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Let’s see what happens when the changes make it to generic Mediawiki, and then turn up in my aptitude upgrades.

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Especially when they’re dropped after a few years when the dev team gets bored/laid off/sold to a competitor.

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I use the Vector legacy (2010) skin, so I assumed that there had been dozens of changes to each of the other skins that I don’t use.

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Oh no! I’ve been using a wonderful extension for Firefox that modernizes wikipedia, and that now appears to be broken.

My incredibly idiosyncratic workflow has been broken to the benefit of everyone. I will not stand for this! I demand that wikimedia undoes all of the changes.

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Try switching to a different Wikipedia skin. Go to Preferences and select Appearance.

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Or, in the case of adobe, aren’t even shiny. They just make things worse.

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“…and a header that pins to the top of the window as you scroll”

I hope this can be turned off, as I hate these things.

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I don’t like the empty space on the right side. If I’d wanted that blank, I’d have made the browser window smaller.

I’ll tinker later.

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I used to be an editor and administrator eons ago – nearly 20 years ago, actually.

Is anyone here an active editor now? If so, what’s the culture like now? I’m guessing, based on pure speculation, that the number of active editors is way down from its peak, but that could be entirely a false-consensus bias simply because I’m not there anymore.

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… TIL people still use aptitude

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If you use a debian dialect, sure, why not?

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Herm.

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Yeah, every once in a while somebody trots out the old “studies have shown that longer lines are harder to read” bit and I want to throttle them. Longer lines are easier for me to read, and as a bonus they require less scrolling. (Guess what: scrolling makes it harder to read!)

TL;DR: If I want lines to be narrower, I’ll adjust my browser window width, thank you very much.

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Not surprising. Wikipedia is probably the only community I’ve ever tried to participate in that’s more hostile than StackOverflow. I made attempts to contribute and be a good steward but the constant skullduggery of others by sabotaging pretty much anything I did basically drove me away.

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There’s (unsurprisingly) an XKCD for that.

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Ye, every time I open an app and the UI has ‘change for the better’, I think oh FFS, it was totally fine before and now I can’t even tell if something is selected!

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