[Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia redefined -- typography and UX and such

[Ziko van Dijk]

Perfectly sound remarks, Amir.
I would be a little bit more lenient about their grades. The problems
linked to this proposal are smaller than the achievements.
One could consider the "W" an abbreviation of "Wikimedia", or take
"WM". WM Commons, WM Source, WM News, WM Wikipedia. If in your
language it is a VM or something else, in "local" characters no
problem, use them.
The letter type could be a better one, indeed.
"History": It's amazing how little those terms are unified among the
Wikipedia language versions. A big renaming after 10 years of organic
growth would be great.
Kind regards
Ziko


2012/8/8 Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il>:
> 2012/8/8 Michel Vuijlsteke <wikipedia at zog.org>
>>
>> Well, it's certainly a possible starting point for discussion:
>> http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/
>
> TL;DR:
> * It's so-so for a mid-term design school project: It shows that they
> can draw mock-ups, but I doubt that they would get high grades for
> typography, logo design, and understanding the client's needs.
> * It's not so useful as design ideas for the actual Wikipedia, except
> some proposed reader-centric features.
>
> Now, the longer version.
>
> The beginning is just horrible:
>
> * They picked a font in which the capital I looks like a J. The fact
> that the capital J there is longer doesn't help at all. It's not an
> original typographic solution. It's just weird, ugly and hard to read.
> It may be useful somewhere, but not here.
> * They want to redesign the Wikipedia logo, but they start from the
> one that was retired two years ago. So yes, the ideas are the same,
> but they should still do their homework properly.
> * They want to kill all the scripts except Latin from the logo. On the
> main page they want to make the big languages even bigger on the main
> page and to make small languages even smaller. Imperialism FTW.
> * They create logos for sister projects from their English names and
> once more disregard the notion that there are other languages in the
> world. And that it's rarely a good idea to design logos from letters
> without a good reason to begin with.
>
> Somewhat better ideas begin in the middle. What they call "history" is
> completely different from what editors call "history". They should
> have called it "reading list" or "what I read" or something. It
> requires an account, which is not so relevant to most people in the
> current setup. That said, their idea of history can be useful. If
> nothing else, it's a good reminder that MediaWiki's technical
> innovations are mostly aimed at the editors (1%) and not the readers
> (99%). The "Quote" button that they propose is not a bad idea either.
>
> Then they get to editing. Basically, they don't propose anything very
> different from what the Visual Editor is going to be. In fact, the
> current testing version of the Visual Editor is already quite close to
> that. And they use "history" again, with a different meaning,
> disregarding the very basic design principle that different things
> should have different names. (Come to think of it, using "history" the
> way we use it today is not a great idea either. It's easy to confuse
> it with the subject of History. In the Hebrew Wikipedia the "View
> history" tab is called "Previous versions", which makes a lot more
> sense.)
>
> Towards the end they discuss the "portal of Wikipedia", by which they
> actually mean the Main Page of the English Wikipedia, and disregard
> yet again that there are other languages.
>
> So OK, it brings up a few areas where we can improve, but the solution
> as they propose it is not viable. I'm not sure that they meant it to
> be.
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
>
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