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: 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?