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.
On Dec 11, 2011 10:03 PM, "Daniel R. Tobias" dan@tobias.name wrote:
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.
This. A hundred times, this.
Compare Quora and Wikipedia: I have reached the unenviable situation of having the rich-text editor lag while typing on my laptop (with 2Gb RAM and a 2.2GHz dual core CPU).
It is 2011: beyond "flashiness", I have no idea why a webapp performs worse than the first version of Word I used back on my 386. But at least the user experience doesn't scare people by introducing the minimal costs of actually having to use one's brain, right?