SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Wikipedia has released their new layout, which unsurprisingly includes whitespace bars on either side, justified by the claim "most people prefer a column 60-80 characters wide" (although it's not that extreme).
The changes being introduced are not very dramatic — in fact, they may not even be immediately noticed by some users. The organization, however, says the update was necessary in order to meet the needs of the next generation of internet users, including those who are more newly coming online and may have less familiarity with the internet.
To develop the new interface, the foundation engaged with more than 30 different volunteer groups from around the world, with users in places like India, Indonesia, Ghana and Argentina, among others, all helping to test the update and provide insights into the product development. The goal for the update was to make Wikipedia more of a modern web platform, it said, and to remove clutter, while also making it easier for users to contribute. It additionally aimed to make the desktop web version more consistent with Wikipedia's mobile counterpart.
It is possible to go back to the old layout, if you log in to the site and set it in your preferences.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by cykros on Monday January 23 2023, @11:45AM (11 children)
To quote Green Day, wake me up when September ends.
Not being able to read text isn't a technical issue, and has nothing to do with being unfamiliar with the Internet. It's a reading issue -- if anything brought on by folks being too familiar with "the Internet" as they access everything through Youtube and Tiktok, where they can be unmolested by text getting in the way of their "information." Guess it's time I finally register for the site so as to use an efficient layout...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Monday January 23 2023, @12:59PM (3 children)
Having a super wide layout is a readability issue, but it's kind of racist too imply that it's the new users coming in from the developing world when people on general have an easier time keeping track of the line they're on when the content using super wide. This is one of the issues that has come as a result of monitors becoming do wide as you don't need the width for some tasks, the vertical orientation that Xerox used is better for s lot of reading tasks
(Score: 3, Troll) by crafoo on Monday January 23 2023, @01:06PM
They're reporting results. If you find those results racist the problem is with you, not reality.
Maybe you're suggesting the newcomers aren't familiar with how to resize a window using a GUI operating system.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Mykl on Monday January 23 2023, @09:48PM (1 child)
Who said anything about new users coming in from the developing world? Whitespace is mostly about fitting in with the current look of many websites, not about making things more readable for non-Western people.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday January 26 2023, @12:46AM
Why would you need an international group to figure out that relatively narrow columns are better?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2023, @02:21PM (6 children)
Some of the Nu Wikipedia pages only load in the majority of body text after a delay on my system. It could be a technical issue, JavaScript the likely culprit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Tuesday January 24 2023, @02:06AM (5 children)
I have JS turned off there, and doesn't make any difference -- still sometimes get a long lag before full load. It's just a shit layout. The jump index has vanished entirely and the page is excessively wide, and looks, as someone above implied, designed for people new to this reading thing.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday January 24 2023, @03:14AM (4 children)
Some saying that includes the phrase "idle hands" comes to mind...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday January 24 2023, @04:59AM (3 children)
Gee, I wonder why that could be... myself, I'm reminded of the phrase, "justify their paycheck".
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Tuesday January 24 2023, @05:13AM (2 children)
My dad used to call it "make work".
I'd agree with him, and add "pad resume with kewl stuff".
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2023, @02:21PM (1 child)
Not just the font or whatever, but somebody has been systematically going through all the math articles for years and years destroying the readability. It's like a student with a purity boner decided we all need to learn in the most abstract possible way - but half way through lost interest (or failed their exams), leaving a mush of confusing notation and poorly explained concepts.
I remember when it was all green fields.... OFFFFF THE LAWN KIDS.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday January 28 2023, @01:09AM
I'm okay with math when applied to real-world stuff. I do have a BSEE, and aced some MS courses in signal processing, but always struggled with math when it's just for math's sake. If that makes any sense... Don't misunderstand, some of the greatest scientists were mathematicians, from Newton, to Einstein, to, Euler, to Fibonacci, to (especially!) Maxwell, to, well, you know the list. I have to see, or at least be able to more clearly envision whatever the situation is for the math to click for me.
I remember when we first learned integrals (which scared the crap out of me), people kept trying to encourage me by explaining "the area under a curve", and I was like "so what? Who cares? When and why would I ever care?" If I was teaching it, I think I could have explained it in a very useful and tangible way. Of course I did finally understand it. It really made sense when we derived RMS (not Richard Stallman!) values.
Anyway, as such, I understand didactic-types trying to reach students. Like pretty much everything in life, no one size fits all. I'm saddened to hear it's only getting worse and worse! But I won't let myself get on my long-winded soapbox about "education" and the systems in place. Ugh. Grrr.
In uni we had to do all kinds of calculating, deriving, equations, systematic solving, etc. I kind of miss all that. I always did very well on final exams, and always assumed and hoped I'd be doing much of that in the "real world". Sadly I've never used it much, but like they told us, it gave me a very solid understanding of logical methodical thinking and deriving hopefully useful stuff.