Time to abandon Wikipedia? / Another site destroyed by poor design

As I have noted in the past, redesigns of websites almost invariably turn out for the worse—it would have been better to stick with the earlier design. Indeed, there are some websites where the usability, readability, or whatnot was worsened to such a degree that I decided to abandon them, including FML ([1]), Etymonline, and the Daily Sceptic ([2]).* Also see [2] for a little more on the general issue.

*Links go to prior discussions. Linking to the site in question seems counterproductive.

Now, however, there might be a truly horrible problem—Wikipedia!

I first saw a weird misdesign some months ago in the French version, but, while being puzzled about the idiotic design, I did not dwell on the issue. (While I do use French Wikipedia, it is a far from everyday occurrence.)

Over the last few days, I have, again and again, seen a similar misdesign on English Wikipedia. Give or take, about half my visits have given me a page with the sensible old design—the rest, something absurd.

Apart from a different look-and-feel of the main page contents, which might or might not be an acquirable taste,* there are at least three overlapping** issues, with the suspicion that I would find more on a deeper investigation:

*It is very important to keep the difference between the misdesigned and the merely new, unaccustomed, different, whatnot in mind. That said, I am not an immediate fan of the new look-and-feel.

**Overlapping to the degree that I could have drawn the borders between the items differently or divided them into a different number of issues.

1. The extensive old left-hand menu has been removed. Some of the entries appear to have no new correspondent, while the listing of language-versions has been moved to some type of separate element.* This has the considerable disadvantage, in general, that it is impossible to get a good overview of the available language-versions at a glance** and that it requires more steps to find the links to other language-versions. From a more personal point of view, I note that the other languages are much harder to get at without a mouse*** than before and that one common personal use-case now has so much additional overhead that it is not worth the bother: when I look something up in English, I often check the corresponding Swedish and German names merely by searching for “sve” and “deu”, respectively, and seeing what link is displayed (ditto, m.m., when I look something up in Swedish or German).

   *And a highly misdesigned one at that: It looks like a button but behaves likes a select element and/or an improvised menu, thereby violating one of the fundamental rules of design—element behavior should be consistent with looks. (Unfortunately, an increasingly common problem.)

   **A common use-case for less proficient English speakers is to open the English page for an unknown word and then to navigate to a native or otherwise better known language in order to read both pages in parallel or otherwise rely less on the English one. (While this does not apply to me personally, I do use the same approach with e.g. the aforementioned French.) Note the risk of building frustration when, for page after page, there is not just an increase in effort—but also a considerable risk that effort is put in in vain, as the lack of the right language-version only becomes detectable after effort has already been put in.

   ***I have increasingly abandoned mouse use, do not usually have one attached to my computer, and would, were it not for the many tools that are built under the assumption of a mouse, recommend others to follow my example. Not using a mouse is easier on the fingers and with the right tools faster and more comfortable.

2. The left-hand side is now occupied with what appears to be the table of contents, which has no place there, is rarely helpful at all and/or is rarely helpful except for a first overview or first navigation (implying that a constant display is pointless), and which takes so much more space horizontally that the main text is both reduced in width and artificially shifted sideways. This is highly sub-optimal on even a 16:9 display—and could be a major problem with narrower dimensions. (A smart-phone used to show the same design, e.g., might have considerably more table of contents than main text on the screen, if held upright. The user would then be forced to turn the smart-phone sideways—a decision that should be his, not Wikipedia’s.)

   A complication that I have not investigated is what happens when the table of contents grows unusually wide, but the result is bound to be either an incomplete display of the table of contents (making the pointless even more so) or an even further reduction-in-width and/or shift of the main contents.

3. The implementation appears to use some variation of “position: fixed” or “position: sticky”. Both are illegitimate, should never have been invented, and should never or only in very, very rare exceptions be used by a professional web-designer. Also see [1], especially for a discussion of “position: fixed” with regard to top menus.

What to do now? I have not made up my own mind yet, but in light of the deteriorating quality of and increasing Leftist agenda pushing in the contents of Wikipedia (cf. e.g. [3]; things have grown even worse since then), it might well be time to abandon the English version. The German and Swedish versions still (knock-on-wood) have an older interface and are not as bad in terms of Leftist distortions. For English contents, a source like infogalactic.com might be useful: this is a fork of an older version of Wikipedia, it still has the old interface, and it has to some (but insufficient) degree been edited to counter existing Leftist distortions. On the downside, it is sometimes out-of-date and receives less new content. (Other replacement candidates exist, but I have not yet had the time to investigate them.)

For those wishing to remain with Wikipedia, some experiments with “skins” might help, but these require the user to be logged in, which is idiotic for reading (as opposed to editing), as it allows Wikipedia to track any and all readings on a personal basis. It might also be counterproductive for Tor users. A URL parameter “useskin” is available, but will only affect the page immediately called—it is not propagated when links are opened, which makes it borderline useless. In both cases, the user is still ultimately dependent on what customization Wikipedia allows, which, going by general software/website trends, is likely to be less and less over time. The mobile* version is slightly better than the regular/desktop version, but not by much.

*Replace “en.wikipedia” with “en.m.wikipedia”.

There might or might not be a solution available over userCSS (or whatever the local browser equivalent is called); however, I have not investigated this, the amount of work could be out of proportion to the benefit, and even so trivial a change as a renamed element could cause a solution to fail again. Moreover, there is no guarantee that any given browser will support it.

Equally, there might or might not be a solution over some type of external reader program. This, too, I have not yet investigated.

(Of course, any workaround for the design issues will still leave the content problems. Cf. [3] again.)

Note on date and state:
The time of writing is January 20, 2023, and the text reflects the state at the time of writing. The future is likely to bring changes.

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