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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: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2023, @12:11PM (15 children)
It’s also been like this in LaTeX for as long as I can remember. It’s not a fad, but true that the wider, the more difficult it gets to continue reading from one line to the next.
I’m more concerned about the apparent disappearance of the capability to switch languages in one non-javascript click in the sidebar. Wikipedia has been my choice translation tool for some specific cases (e.g. fauna, flora, cooking ingredients...) and having to enable javascript with all the pop-ups jumping at my face whenever my mouse pointer dares hover over a link is really diminishing my browsing experience. If anyone has a css trick or something to force the display of the language version drop-down menu, I’d be immensely grateful!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2023, @12:13PM (2 children)
Well, replying to my own rant... apparently something has changed since I initially checked this new version. It seems I can now open that drop-down menu without javascript.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by RS3 on Monday January 23 2023, @07:03PM (1 child)
Maybe a CSS issue?
Or maybe your browser had to download and install a new font or character set?
I don't mean to be a shill for Vivaldi, but I recently discovered a tiny icon at the right-hand side of the URL slot: it toggles between normal and "reader" mode. It's pretty cool. Not sure if other browsers have that, but they should promote that feature more. It cleans up everything, enlarges the font, does what it advertises.
<ctrl> - scroll wheel zooms in and out on most browsers.
Also there's usually a "fit to width" function somewhere, but sometimes CSS will override that.
My sort of main browser, "Old Opera" (12.18 Presto, not chrome-based), allows me to disable CSS on a page by choosing "View -> Style -> User Mode". It can be configured globally off too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2023, @02:25PM
Fortunately Firefox has pocket built-in and enabled by default... said nobody ever.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Monday January 23 2023, @01:40PM (11 children)
It's been like that because LaTeX is backwards-compatible with papers in maths journals which are that way because [long backtrace elided] medieval manuscripts. Seriously, that's what it's backwards-compatible with. So people don't "prefer 60-80 characters", they prefer whatever they prefer, which in my cases is whatever fits nicely on the screen. In particular I don't want someone forcing me to read a format used by medieval monks, if I really want to read a long narrow column (hint: I don't) I'll resize the window.
And as for the "barely noticeable", sure, it's barely noticeable if you're blind. This nonsense originated from this Slate article [slate.com], written by Annie Rauwerda, who is a hardcore Wikipedia cheerleader. It's like Slate publishing an article telling is how great Trump was as president, authored by Kayleigh McEnany a.k.a. Bullshit Barbie.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by number11 on Monday January 23 2023, @05:27PM (10 children)
Have to say the Wikipedia change is not very noticeable to me, and I'm not blind yet. I see the left sidebar has gotten a bit wider, but no problem with the text. As I shrink the width of the window, first one sidebar and then the other go away.
Yes, narrow (print-newspaper) sized columns are a too narrow. But extremely wide columns (say, >42 ems or 110 characters) are difficult to read when you hit the jump to the next line, unless leading (linespacing) is increased a lot to compensate. My desktop display's native 1920x1080 resolution gives text lines here on SN that are a bit too long, display-wide text on an 49" 5120x1440 monitor sitting on your desk 18" from your face would be an extreme example. But all my opinions are with my own (past warranty) eyes and display, and none from trying to read on a mobile device (which is like looking at the Internet through a keyhole).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RS3 on Monday January 23 2023, @07:24PM (9 children)
In 12th grade (high school senior) they had a fairly advanced / experimental speed reading course, which I took, and I might say it changed my life. One major factor is: don't scan side-to-side as much- try to just scan down and let your peripheral vision pick up on, well, the periphery. "Big" words, proper nouns, names, etc., might need a direct look.
The fairly obvious takeaway is: the wider the text, the less efficiently you can read. I think they figured that out a very long time ago, hence "newspaper columns".
If I'm really interested in, or need to read something long, I'll often skinny up the tab, or if the browser won't let me resize tabs, I'll resize the entire browser so I can read much faster and with comprehension.
Not a fan of wide screens, and I'm not sure why _everything_ has gone that way. Sure, for some things wide is great, but I don't think anyone still makes a 3x4 display. Some web pages have so much horizontal crap top and bottom that you end up with a 10:1 slit as a viewing window. (I may have exaggerated a bit there...)
I have a new-to-me and not in use yet laptop with a 1920x1080 display. It's a bigger one- maybe 17"? I'm sure I'll adjust to it. Some years ago I upgraded the one I'm on now from 1440x900 to present 1680x1050. I had to upsize fonts and icons a bit, but I have fairly good, a little nearsighted vision, so it works well.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by driverless on Tuesday January 24 2023, @02:20AM (7 children)
It's actually a lot more complicated than that. The studies on ideal column width go back 100-150 years and found that columns of 3 - 3.5 inches (I'll quote the antique form of measurement because that's what they used then) were ideal, however newspaper columns were more like 1.5 - 2.5 inches which meant that they never followed the science from the get-go. Also those are hundred-year-old studies, more recent studies, so only 40-50 years old, show that on computer screens wider text blocks read better, and that was on ancient green-screen monitors not what we use today.
It also depends on what you're reading, for man-bites-dog you want the quick scanning of newspaper columns, for anything serious you definitely don't, which is why you've never seen a textbook formatted in narrow columns.
Maybe the folks on Wikipedia who made this change could look it up somewhere, there's bound to be some sort of online encyclopedia they could consult.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Tuesday January 24 2023, @02:28AM (2 children)
Was it inches or number of characters per column? Because I find the latter is more important to readability. Very narrow newspaper columns generally used very small print, so might have the same number of horizontal characters. Wider columns used larger print.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday January 24 2023, @02:39AM (1 child)
Ah, good point! Yeah, there was something about typeface-dependence but I'd have to go look it up.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday January 24 2023, @03:19AM
Thanks, all very interesting. In the rare times I narrow-up my browser, I don't need nor like it as skinny as a newspaper column, so there are probably many factors at play as you guys have informed about.
(Score: 2) by number11 on Wednesday January 25 2023, @01:16AM (3 children)
I think that newspaper column size probably stems from something other than readability. They tend to be about the minimum width that you can have without making justified type show too much bad spacing and bad breaks. And probably the demands of layout flexibility, especially in the era of physical type. Maybe even for efficiency when setting type (and making corrections) in the Linotype era (where you had to replace the entire line when making a fix).
For readable ink on paper, they had Times New Roman :)
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday January 25 2023, @01:27AM
Yeah, I'd thought about typesetting issues too but wasn't sure what the factor would be, since this goes back to manual typesetting the formatting of text to fit around the very narrow columns must have been a huge PITA, but as you say it may have been a convenience factor, changing a few words in a narrow column is much easier than re-setting a full-page line. Anyone know if there was any advantage to using very narrow vs. wide composing sticks in manual typesetting?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday January 25 2023, @01:34AM
As a followup, since the multi-column print format predates any studies on its readability by several centuries it's likely it was adopted for some reason other than readability. A quick Google isn't turning up anything but I'm guessing there was some practical reason to lay it out that way.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday January 26 2023, @01:51AM
Also in places like New York, there's a way of finding a paper with columns like that which takes up fast less space. I've seen it done and have no idea how to do it, but effectively each page is folded in half.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2023, @02:30PM
The fairly obvious takeaway is what the fuck are you reading? Who the fuck wrote so much fluff that you can skim read 90% of it? Why the fuck are we putting up with this bullshit?