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Why Is Wikipedia So Ugly?
Hugh Pickens writes "Megan Garber writes in the Atlantic that aesthetically, Wikipedia is remarkably unattractive. 'The gridded layout! The disregard for mind-calming images! The vaguely Geocities-esque environment! Whether it's ironic or fitting, it is undeniable: The Sum of All Human Knowledge, when actually summed up, is pretty ugly.' But Wikipedians consider the site's homeliness as a feature rather than a bug. 'Wikipedia has always been kind of a homely, awkward, handcrafted-looking site,' says Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, adding that the homeliness 'is part of its awkward charm.' Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr have built followings in part because of their exceedingly simple interfaces. Everything about their design says, 'Come on, guys. Participate. It's easy,' while Wikipedia, so far, has been pretty much the opposite of that. 'The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit' might more properly be nicknamed 'the free encyclopedia that any geek can edit.' This is particularly problematic because one of the Wikimedia Foundation's broad strategic goals is to expand its base of editors. While the editing interface is friendly to the site's super-users who tend to be so committed to Wikipedia's mission that they're willing to do a lot to contribute to it, if Wikipedia wants to make itself more attractive to users, a superficial makeover may be just the thing Wikipedia needs to begin growing in a more meaningful way."
Most websites that look awesome have almost no content which is hidden on several pages with lots of ads in between. No thx like it simple.
is all this is.
If your site has good content, the people will come regardless. Much better than a really pretty site with crap content, in my opinion. Another example here is, craigslist. I can't stand to even load up craigslist. It looks so freaking awful, yet they have made a fortune off that 1995-html1.0-looking crap.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
This is a complaint I have heard a lot in my programming career. In my own experience, most coders I have worked with are focused on functionality and simplicity; getting as much information out there in as straightforward a manner as possible. Often, this means "ugly" to non-CS people. Personally, I find Wikipedia easy to read and easy to navigate. Sure, it may not have graphics popping out everywhere or things dancing across the screen but when I hit WP, all I want is information.
Now, could it be better? Possibly. It is easy enough to create a new skin for it and give it some zip but I doubt the team would ever make it a default. WP is meant to be accessed on any device, through any type of connection (although it does have some issues in that department).
If I want lots of useless clutter, I will go to any number of large news organizations' websites.
Personally, I think it looks clean.
Wikipedia is all function. It is efficient, loads fast, list information well. Improving aesthetics to the detriment of functionality is something seen far too often in the web and it is something done only by idiots. Of which there are many, unfortunately.
Bottom line: Wikipedia is only for those seeking knowledge. All others, please go away, you are not welcome and your criticism is misdirected.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
if Wikipedia wants to make itself more attractive to users, a superficial makeover may be just the thing Wikipedia needs to begin growing in a more meaningful way.
What? Because it looks pretty, people will start reading an encyclopedia? Are you nuts?
First of all, last time I checked Wikipedia was in the top 10 of most visited websites on this planet. So they seem to be attracting users just fine. And obviously, the one and only thing that matters is the quality of their content. As long as Wikipedia continues to provide great information on basically any conceivable subject, a simple uncluttered layout to access that information is all they need.
Now I get the impression (also by the screenshot) that the article is mainly talking about Wikipedia's homepage. There might be some room for improvement there, but seriously, who goes to Wikipedia to look at the homepage? It's all about the articles. And those pages simply look fine.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
To paraphrase a favorite character of mine, "... I'm so sick of (article writers like this) I could vomit...".
Wikipedia has at its core one basic job to do: convey information. Setting aside for the moment the questions of validity of content, sources, spats between editors, astroturfing, etc, the prime question is, how quickly and easily was one able to find what one was looking for and absorb it. This is a task at which I personally feel Wikipedia does a fine job. It is a simple, straightforward visual style that doesn't bolt on any extraneous flash (no pun intended) or style just for flash or style's sake.
By the way, when the article author compares Wikipedia and Geocities visual style and finds similarities, I'm prompted to wonder where the author actually was when Geocities was in its heydey.
As for the complaint about the complexities of editing on Wikipedia: Heaven forbid that when editing one of the great repositories of human knowledge, that the editors should take the time required to learn the skills necessary to do so... seriously, if Wikipedia ever "redesigns" itself to appeal anywhere near the lowest common denominator of the Facebook/Twitter/Myspace generation, I quit.
So Wikimedia needs to make a choice:
-If they simplify the site to make it more accessible, they will probably build a larger, more diverse population of contributors, and will also probably move Wikipedia some distance down the spectrum from "academically valuable tertiary resource" towards "Youtube comments section".
-Or they can keep it the way it is, with a relatively small community of dedicated contributors, which has allowed it to become one of the most valuable and extraordinary creations of the internet age.
Personally I value excellence over political correctness, so I would take the second route.
What's ugly about a site that at one blink of the eye shows you exactly what you need? A site that is meant to be informative. A site that loads like the wind blows!
May the rapist web designers stay away from one of the jewels of the internet. Less bloat is more usability.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
And unlike Facebook, Wikipedia's UI seems relatively stable and bug-free, and to me is easier to use. Wikipedia does a great job at presenting information without getting in the way. It's not flashy and doesn't need to be flashy, and can stand alone on the strength of its sheer usefulness without having to have a lot of useless eye candy. The markup they use isn't particularly difficult to work with either.
Decoration gets in the way of functionality. Wikipedia is probably over-decorated as it is, and adding what Garber wants would make it both slower and less accessible.
In a nutshell, she's clueless on this topic.
Indeed, Facebook's UI is too complex and dense for its own good. Profiles that use the timeline are nearly impossible to navigate easily. On the other hand, I do like Wikipedia's simple UI. Simple does not mean useless.
Don't forget functional.
Today everything has to look like it has been released by apple or it's ugly.
I cringe when I see all the resources and battery consumption that go into features like false reflections in metallic buttons on a friggin screen.
I want a website that is designed for quick lookups to be just that, quick! And, it is!
I'd beg to differ with that statement. How much simpler can you possibly get than what Wikipedia has? There are no drop down menus in obscure places you have to find. There aren't a bunch of different settings to look for. Functionality from one page to another is the always the same, unlike all the other aforementioned sites. Wikipedia is the epitome of simplicity. The writer is just delirious.
When it comes to an encyclopedia, I want it to be written by geeks.
I want it to be written by geeks in the subject of the article, not necessarily computer geeks if the subject is not information science or information technology. For example, there used to be (still is?) a perception that articles' "in popular culture" were overpopulated with entries from works loved by the demographic of computer geeks who are willing to take time to learn the markup. When I read a chemistry article, I want it to be written by chemistry geeks. When I read a linguistic theory article, I want it to be written by language geeks. When I read an article on psychology or religion or other social sciences, I want it to be written by experts in the field, not people with a vested interest in discrediting the field.
The big difference between Facebook and Wikipedia, is that Facebook is filled with people trying to be nice to you to spread posts about nothing, and Wikipedia is filled with people trying to be nasty to you to write articles about everything.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
This kind of comment comes from the same kind of morons who brought us the re-tooling, for instance, of GMail. It was great (to use) the way it was. Now I hear nothing (NOTHING!) but complaints about it (or blank stares which when probed yield statements of powerlessness). If the underlying code was ugly, the first update cycle should have been to upgrade the code in a way that none of the users would notice.
Note to Jimmy Wales: resist the UX-groupthink mob who would tell you to make Wikipedia more tablet friendly. If it's ugly, it's ugly the way the old White Pages were ugly. Ugly and informative. The way a real newspaper used to be ugly (especially the front sections up to where the editorials, letters and Op-Ed pieces lay): ugly, information rich and informative.
Note to the groupthink mob: if you must make something tablet-friendly, make sure it's still screen friendly during the design before you foist it on those of us who haven't caved-in to constant computing through tablet ownership.
<quickly hitting submit before going off and doing something real>...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
The problem with WYSIWYG editors is that the browsers themselves add their own mess of HTML and CSS to the things you edit.
The problem with WYSIWYG editors is that the browsers themselves add their own mess of HTML and CSS to the things you edit.
The problem with WYSWYG is that it's WYSIWYBNAEG.
Markup != presentation, which web "designers" still haven't gotten into their heads in more than fifteen years of fail after fail.
And in the case of Wikipedia, it does so exceedingly well because of its simplicity, not despite it. The less cluttered it is, the more the actual information pops to the front, and the more room there is for actual information.
Those who wants a rounded corner ajax-slowed video blog without all the boring details are free to make them. Don't hijack wikipedia, though. /., but we all noticed how well received that was.
You tried to hijack
Quite true, however just because a full WYSWYG editor would be a bad idea, doesn't mean you shouldn't have something beyond the primitive plain text. Things like ref's make editing the plain text pretty painful right now, as you simply can't read the text properly when every line is interrupted by three lines of ref hyperlinks and link descriptions. The proper answer should be a proper structured view of the text that makes it clear where tags start and stop, but also keeps the text human readable without looking like random markup soup.
"Why Is Wikipedia So Ugly?" presupposes that Wikipedia is ugly, and forces that notion on listener/reader. You can get away with posing a question in an article title, but not loading a question.
Those who are still in the MS-Office stage of document creation have no business in editing wikipedia. These people mostly have a very shallow view of almost anything, except politics in the corporation. In the "hard" sciences they use LaTeX to do their publications, and that is for a reason. Most people don't have useful knowledge to be contributed to wikipedia over more than two paragraphs, anyway. How hard is it learning how to make a paragraph heading and how to make line breaks ? Real experts in some field (say honey bees) spend thousands of hours in the field and spending a few hours to learn wiki syntax is no big investment relative to that.
I don't get this "Wikipedia is Ugly" idea either; I think it looks really good personally. There isn't a bunch of extra flashy crap, just the article text, some tables listing key points concisely, some relevant photos, and finally references at the bottom. Then there's a simple menu on the left, and some tabs to look at the "Talk" page, edit the content, or view the edit history, and a search box plus a link to log in or create an account. What little color there is is muted and very neutral. What's the problem?
I think this is just a bunch of Web 2.0 morons complaining because it hasn't been completely redesigned and uglified for no reason at all, just like Gmail's crappy new interface; change for change's sake.