Wikipedia has launched a new page design, and like all new designs, it is being poorly received by a number of people who can’t understand why they even bothered, why they made everything worse, or why anybody would want this rather than the old design.
The old “vector” design was made the default in 2010, so “every 13 years” doesn’t seem like too often for a design refresh. That said, I’m sympathetic to the idea that a new design should be objectively better in some way, rather than just change for change’s sake. So let’s compare:
Old skin, minimum width: https://ibb.co/Pcvn7VP
New skin, same width: https://ibb.co/PgxF8hf
Old skin, maximum size: https://ibb.co/WsptkCY
New skin, same size: https://ibb.co/x8NmgZq
In both cases, more article content is visible and line lengths are more readable. I’m sure there are some edge cases in which things have objectively gotten worse, but it’s also easy to keep using the old skin, or any of a few alternatives: add ?useskin=vector to the end of any Wikipedia URL for the old skin, or log in to set a default for yourself. There’s also a bookmarklet available on the Wikipedia page for skins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin
Old or new, Wikipedia remains a good resource that I use frequently. Kudos to the design team on the new look.
@jeffreynye Strong disagree on line widths, but fortunately, there are other skins that have very long line widths.
@pwinn I say this as someone who is very familiar with the research around document readability: I think the limited line width fundamentally misunderstands what Wikipedia is for (at least for me, and I think for most other users) https://masthead.social/@jeffreynye/109723080690213224
@jeffreynye Sure, I didn’t question you. I just said there are options for people who prefer unlimited line width. I prefer this.
@pwinn The new TOC is very promising (though there are bugs to work out). The line-width restriction is very bad!