Another Wikipedia Redesign (dribbble.com)
over 9 years ago from Brian A., Senior UX Designer
over 9 years ago from Brian A., Senior UX Designer
i have no idea what the mockups or the designer's comments have to do with Wikipedia or reality.
Visually, these new redesigns are really great. From a UI standpoint they're doing a lot right. Unfortunately the problem that they keep running into is the site's functionality.
Wikipedia is all about the information. People use it because it's simple and content-driven. Many of these redesigns, and this one in particular, seem to focus more on aesthetic and modern design trends than the information itself.
By embedding Article clips, Tweets, Quotes, Flickr and Instagram Photos, Youtube videos and Podcasts each article would be much more media rich, up to date and wouldn’t have an outdated encyclopaedic look.
Embedding social media links and videos within the article would only distract from the article. For a site like Wikipedia, they're totally unnecessary.
Personally, I much prefer 1910's Wikipedia redesign. It's simple and content-driven, uses a clean grid system, and has a minimal aesthetic.
First off, how I'd view this is it isn't a redesign of Wikipedia, it's a design for a dynamic 'magazine' that uses Wikipedia as a source (one of many).
This redesign would need a Wikipedia donation banner so huge that it would push all that beautiful clean design down off the screen.
By embedding Article clips, Tweets, Quotes, Flickr and Instagram Photos, Youtube videos and Podcasts each article would be much more media rich, up to date and wouldn’t have an outdated encyclopaedic look. Nowadays you can embed a live Feed related to the content without a need for a human update.
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia though, not a social media stream. All these sources would still require human moderation and fact checking.
Human moderation is crucial to Wikipedia, pages get vandalised all the time. Bringing in a live unmoderated feed from a social network of all places is just asking for trouble. (Also, Medium? Really?)
We want to make Wikipedia look a bit more like a magazine and less a text-only book with a lot of references that make it really hard to read.
References are kind of mandatory when it comes to dealing with factual information. Lets not destroy one of the few places left on the internet where they're actually still used.
Another unsolicited Wikipedia redesign to fuel the fire. Thoughts on this one?
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