Das Referenz: Wikipedia Redesigned for iPad

https://medium.com/@raureif/65af999b576d

by sygma • 12 years ago

50 50 12 years ago

Looks awesome! Not sure I love the colour scheme, but overall a huge improvement. Unfortunately I'm an Android user. Hope to see this come there sometime soon :)

officemonkey• 12 years ago

I think the Wikipedia app on Android actually looks pretty good, especially on my 7 inch Nexus tablet.

I'm looking forward for this one to be ported someday. I'd pay a couple bucks for it even.

kefs• 12 years ago

Wikimedia just released the new Wikipedia Beta on the Play store yesterday, if you haven't checked it out.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia....

zdw• 12 years ago

Apparently the app lays down ads on Wikipedia's content unless you cough up $3 or $5.

That sounds questionable at best to me.

matthewmacleod• 12 years ago

Why? From a legal standpoint, it's obviously permitted under either the GFDL or the CC-BY-SA license. From an ethical standpoint, the developers of the app have obviously invested time in this; it's not even like it's a zero-effort shell around the website. I can't see any problem with releasing an ad-supported version.

shittyanalogy2• 12 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advertisements

Including advertisements in a research resource lends itself to all sorts of moral problems, and quite frankly completely obliterates and chance of increased usefulness of the redesign.

darushimo• 12 years ago

I agree that it'd be great if they released the application for free, but I don't see a problem with charging for the app.

This company is arguably improving the experience of viewing that content, and, as a consumer, as long as they're upfront about the ads/cost when I purchase the app (I haven't checked if they are yet), then the ball's in my court to decide whether it's worth the ads and/or the $3/$5 price tag. I can always use a free app or just go to my browser if I don't want to pay.

Or are you finding the fact that they're charging for a product that's built on top of a free service inherently questionable? I definitely vibe with that sentiment at times, but in this case, I can't see a problem with it, especially if it meets Wikipedia's restrictions/standards.

Or is there something else that you find questionable?

spicyj2• 12 years ago

as long as they're upfront about the ads/cost when I purchase the app

They don't mention the ads explicitly on the app page, but the app (with ads) is free, and you can see a list of top in-app purchases which clearly list "Remove Ads" alongside the associated price.

skrebbel• 12 years ago

Is there edit functionality? If not, it's not even remotely "Wikipedia redesigned". More like a personal wikicontent bot.

That said, if it does, I want it. Please port to everywhere.

keeperofdakeys• 12 years ago

At least from the screenshots, I couldn't see links to such options (including discussion and history). While most people would consider these unimportant, I was quite surprised to see that I simply couldn't find them on the official mobile app (not even behind a hidden menu). While most people just want to read content, hiding the features that, (it could be argued) define wikipedia, isn't what I'd call the best design. At the same time, you have to start somewhere, and they may plan to add those features later.

Besides all that, I think it's a good bit of work. Well done devs.

wolfgke3• 12 years ago

If you like to use German names, please observe that "Das Referenz" is not correct German (for native German "Das Referenz" sounds like the German spoken by less able Turkish immigrants, especially when combined with an accent). "Referenz" is a female noun - thus "Die Referenz" is correct German.

spicyj2• 12 years ago

An odd mistake considering they're based in Germany.

wolfgke3• 12 years ago

Then they probably wanted to sound hipster-wise, but nevertheless the hipster-usage of "das" rather reminds me of the following excerpt from a German comedy program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l21uhFCljlU - where "das Bus" is used with a Turkish accent (the comedian Kaya Yanar was born in Turkey).

ulfw2• 12 years ago

Turkish? I'd say American. A lot of people here know 'Das Boot' and have used 'Das' multiple time to try to describe German nouns to me

3rd33• 12 years ago

Maybe to keep it gender neutral?

sp332• 12 years ago

It's not about male or female people, but about a linguistic feature where certain words are syntactically "masculine" or "feminine". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Correlation...

wolfgke3• 12 years ago

Those people who want this "gender neutral" speak really can't be pleased. Consider for example this case (in German, sorry) > http://www.danisch.de/blog/2013/03/14/zwangsverblodung-im-so... where some female professor for gender studies complains that the neutral article "das" is used for "Mädchen" ("das Mächen" - "the girl"), because this way girls are degraded to objects. For science: the grammatical reason "Mächen" is neuter is because it is the minimization of the outdated noun "Maid".

lcnmrn• 12 years ago

Is this just a WebView with a custom UserScript loaded? I don't have an iPad to test it out.

DrinkWater• 12 years ago

Whats with the Obsession for the German word "Das"? It's also wrong in this case.

GyrosOfWar• 12 years ago

Yeah.. If you're gonna give your app a name from a foreign language, at least look it up in a dictionary. "Die Referenz" would be correct.

swoker• 12 years ago

Even worse, it's a german company. So they're probably screwing us on purpose.

rakoo• 12 years ago

it was clear from the beginning that using Wikipedia means reading articles,
The most important use case for Wikipedia is filling the search field and choosing the correct search result.

See ? That's why your redesign will never _ever_ be even considered by the Wikimedia team: The most important use case for Wikipedia is editing content.

Wikipedia has become what it is and lives because every single human can bring its knowledge and share it with other humans. The Wikimedia (and Wikipedia) team isn't involved in editing content: it "merely" hosts the application. It's up to us, the humans from everywhere, to fill Wikipedia with our knowledge, and it's up to you, the UX/UI designers, to make sure we have the best experience while doing it, so it doesn't feel clunky/difficult/unpleasant. If you remove the edit ability, you effectively kill Wikipedia.

Please stop this. (At least we agree on one point: there are too many attempts at redesigns, and too little work done on actually important projects[0])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor

vacri3• 12 years ago

I guess it depends on your definitions. I agree that the most important use case for Wikipedia is editing, but the primary use case is reading. Out of stereotypical 100 users, only 1 creates and only a further 9 edit on wikipedia, apparently (from a few years ago). They might instead consider that the primary use is the most important?

davidgerard• 12 years ago

This is the canonical polite response to these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AUnsolicited%20redes...

Noctem• 12 years ago

Am I the only one who immediately thought of vas deferens upon reading the name?

currysausage3• 12 years ago

Let’s get this straight: UI-wise, Wikipedia teleports its audience into the year 2004.

Yep, and it feels wonderful.

the_af2• 12 years ago

Agreed. Wikipedia doesn't need a redesign, it's fine as it is. I have some issues with its markup language, but other than that, it's easy to use for reading and editing.

Wikipedia: please don't change. I'm not sold on the cult of Newer Is Better.

sgdesign2• 12 years ago

Isn't what you're saying in essence replacing the cult of "Newer Is Better" by the cult of "Newer Is Worse"?

You can't know that Wikipedia doesn't need a redesign until you see that redesign. People 7 years ago thought their phones were just fine, until they saw the iPhone.

Mithaldu3• 12 years ago

Besides the terrible and pointless abuse of "Das", i find myself amazed that these people purport to be interested in typography, use the article about Gutenberg as their header, and then fail to use "text-align: justify;" as the default for paragraphs.

Edit: On reading further, i find that they did consider it, but decided against providing something that looks great and is helpful to the reader in 99.99999% of all cases, because the remaining 0.00001% don't look perfect. Instead they opt for a solution that is decidedly mediocre² in all cases. Brilliant.

² Note how in the header, Buchprodukti-on is hyphened very awkwardly, while Buchdrucks, a prime candidate, isn't at all.

currysausage3• 12 years ago

I'm not a fan of this project either (see my other comment), but I totally agree with them on this one. Justified text is really hard to get right, even with TeX, InDesign and the like, and simply placing "text-align: justify;" in your CSS will worsen the quality and therefore the readability: Gaps will occur between all words in every other line, which doesn't only look ugly, but also destroys the flow of reading.

Left justification is always preferable over bad full justification; I don't know many (read: any) typographers who would disagree.

The first of Tschichold's Penguin Composition Rules (always worth reading - http://s3.amazonaws.com/tsch/compositionrules.html) says: "All text composition should be as closely word-spaced as possible." By relying on automatic full justification, you violate that rule in cruel ways. "Wide spaces should be strictly avoided."

Mithaldu3• 12 years ago

You'll be hard-pressed to find any wikipedia article that looks bad with it, unless you zoom in to something like 6 words per line on average.

Edit to your edit: I don't particularly care for your appeal to authority when experience has borne out for me that wildly varying line lenghts hinder reading considerably more than occasional gaps. Besides, your authority doesn't even mention justification or alignment, as such i question your binding his statement to that matter.

vacri3• 12 years ago

"Proper hyphenation makes for a balanced right edge of the text column and looks way better."

This is the caption below a full-justified image with several words broken by hyphens - which looks awful, and, more importantly, is harder to read. I'd much rather deal with the occasional 'river' than read hyphen-wrapped words.

ulfw2• 12 years ago

What's this thing of using German words or expressions wrongly lately? No, it's not uuuuber. It's Über. And hell no it's not 'Das Referenz' either, it's 'Die Referent'. And while I'm at it, a Wiener Schnitzel surely isn't a hot dog (hello American fast food chain!). Might as well call a chicken soup 'hamburger' while you're at it...

model-m• 12 years ago

I'm getting tired of young designers who use things like "this feels so 2004" as an insult, and then proceed to reinvent the mistakes of the past.

3rd33• 12 years ago

https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/1200/1*YDjL7m1JuPW...

I consider that as a feature. I don’t mind text in 7pt on a small screen if it allows me to find more quickly what I’m looking for.

chime• 12 years ago

If the creators of this project are reading this thread, I hope you don't take the criticisms here too personally. I don't know why nearly every new project on HN gets completely ripped apart nowadays unless it's some clever hack or backed by a popular/famous creator.

I think the app looks great and compared to the desktop/mobile versions of the Wikipedia website, it is a significant improvement when it comes to readability. So what if it doesn't do justify or support editing content. Justify is a minor setting that can be easily implemented and editing could be a v2.0 feature if the project gains traction.

I love reading Kindle and iBooks on my iPad and it's fantastic that I can now access Wikipedia with the same readability features. You should definitely continue to make improvements, from tables to justification. Keep adding more integration with Wikidata. Maybe allow users to treat any Wikipedia article like an e-book by enabling notes, bookmarking, highlighting etc. I know it's hard to deal with ever changing content but maybe let the user save a specific version with highlight/notes to the iPad (and enable cloud sync).

mcav• 12 years ago

I like to think most people would change their tone if they were talking to the creators face-to-face.

Einstalbert• 12 years ago

I love the look and feel! I'd love for it to come to Android.

sgdesign2• 12 years ago

It's just so much easier and safer to nit-pick than to take the time to explain what you love about something.

But hey, on the plus side nit-picks can be useful to a project creator too, if only to help them anticipate people's objections better.

shittyanalogy2• 12 years ago

Wikipedia is a tool not an app. Tools are designed to be useful not beautiful. Wikipedia extremely useful as is. Any significant change must be a large leap in usefulness to overcome the burden of having to re-teach hundreds of millions of people how to use the tool. Having a specific platform with a unique interface is counter productive at best.

Wikipedia is not stuck in 2004, it's not stuck anywhere. It continues to grow, flourish and be useful to hundreds of millions of people over all sorts of connections and on all sorts of devices.

Thinking how much better wikipedia would be if it were beautiful is like thinking how much better your hammer would be if it were beautiful.

ysleepy• 12 years ago

thats a shitty analogy.

Also wikipedia has more technical dept than the worst govmnt project.

Just look at the php backend shit. The parser alone makes people blind. There does not exist a grammar.

You cannot process the content properly, because only their current php thing parses tge wkitext as the author intended, and it consists of 65% quirks and hacks.

The layout/ html rendering is 10y in the past. I can think of a dozen helpful things the html pages could do, but its not possible because of the rottten backend that literally takes minutes to render some articles.

And that with millions of donations. Wikimedia sucks so hard its almost like they purposefully want to wikipedia from evolving.

mauricesvay• 12 years ago

Every Wikipedia "redesigns" miss the essence of Wikipedia. Of course a better reading experience is desirable. But the goal of Wikipedia is to allow people to share their knowledge by contributing. If a redesign fails to address both sides of the experience, it is probably not a good redesign.

flohofwoe• 12 years ago

Apps feel so 2008 ;) I was slightly interested until I realised that this project is an iOS app, not a web page. Isn't one of Wikipedia's most powerful ideas to make knowledge available to everyone? Other then that, yeah, the least thing Wikipedia needs is a hipster redesign.

Das Referenz: Wikipedia Redesigned for iPad

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