On Sun, 11 Dec 2011 15:01:33 +0000, Charles Matthews wrote:
That said, I deprecate getting "design"
issues mixed up with others. The
use of emotive terms such as cold and unfriendly implies things about
intention and fault that aren't exactly helpful. I don't know whether
arguing that WP is "sui generis" is defensive or not. I can think of
several issues where it allows a reply like "you'd have more of a case if
WP were ...", to fill in to taste with "staffed by paid
workers"/"for
profit"/"offering a different service"/"run on a billion dollar
budget"/"Facebook", etc. These answers seem to me to offer analytical
insight.
While the design and user interface of Wikipedia certainly has things
that could stand improvement, I generally like the fact that it's not
run by a "billion dollar budget" commercial outfit brimming with
meddlesome marketing and management types and artsy graphical
designers, aimed at producing a site design that looks cool when
demoed in PowerPoint presentations, shoves lots of annoying,
intrusive ads at the user and is explicitly designed and structured
to maximize this even at the expense of actual content, and works
well (if at all) only in the particular browsers and platforms
targeted by the developer.
Those sites are hard to navigate, hard to read, slow to load, prone
to crashing your browser, go out of their way to interfere with
normal browser operations like caching and back/forward buttons by
having crazy contraptions of scripts to reinvent those wheels in an
inferior way, and are generally a headache to use in comparison with
Wikipedia.
--
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