I’m interested in design and knowledge. And yes, I am a Wikipedia user even for scientific research and even if this technique is not established in the German research environment. And that’s why I’m writing this article. Look what i found today: Wikipedia Redefined is a project by New! and they show us in a very impressive way how the Wikipedia could look like if it were improved by designers. They show us what you can do, if you use only simple design-elements, colors, fonts and how you can improve the user experience by using simple and powerful tools that are almost already included in Wikipedia.
We all could be a part of it by discussing the ideas with they guys from New! For all of you out there just one question: Didn’t you think of new designed Wikipedia at least one time while using Wikipedia? I did! So here could be the solution…
Short Update:
By the Way: Google is working on a transition from a search engine to a knowledge engine mostly by visualizing connections between search results, gathering not only Wikipedias entries to do so. FYI
By Claudia August 15, 2012 - 11:33 am
Makes so much sense!
(and the real kick comes when you check upon your mental image of wikipedia again and actually re-visit the page after reading the post! – yesterday it was ugly and complicated, now it just hurts…)
Fully agree on the, ahem, logo question – the “w” is enough. And the new logo as a network of colour is beautiful (and reminds me somehow of the MIT logo family, cool).
Brilliant solution also for wiki-family as well as for languages/disciplines. Real time changes are always cool, displaying proportions as well. Suggestion: display languages with some degree of relation to my geographical location? Critical though refering to languages: while it makes sense to me to make proportions tangible and thus produce a more intuitive description of the world, we should take care not to reproduce the same hierachies and power relations all over again. So maybe this feature can be more flexible, democratic, and even affirmative action-like?
While I like the design of the search page (image above) it is too much google style for my taste. Clean is great, but there is so much stuff on wikipedia – can’t there be a beautiful mess in the background inspiring my search? I prefer the portal view or the famous connection clouds (ohhh yeah!). But – connection clouds could rock much more, right? And that would be an interesting part, because now they are all over the web as they help to display networked structures in a handy way – but although their functionality often makes me cheer (e.g. the network graphs in Research Gate), their design stays kind of 1.0.
Love the “mark a quote and save it for later”! How essential! This is how I want to handle online content! Can Sysiphus finally be redeemed? (Does wikipedia have it already? If so, I can’t find it…) Although we could find an alternative for the funny old and just too brute yellow marker, can’t we (and can I choose my own colour/pattern/whatsoever, pleeeease)?
The geomaps – shall we really unify all geomaps in wikipedia? I would agrue against it. (Just realised that this wasn’t the point raised, anyway) Especially in a project that collects and stores knowledge from all over the world on everything you can imagine, plurality is one of the main assets. And when it comes to maps which, like theories or languages, express a specific world view, their differences represent the real wealth in my mind and add much more value than a standardising effort ever could.
Having a map that integrates the information spotted all over wikipedia geoplots, however, is cool (and was the point i guess) – but a huge challenge. Ok, for countries and cities it may work, but that’s not what kicks me about wikipedia. Would like to see that develop further for a range of different content.
Conclusion: Brilliant initiative!
And thank you New! for the handy guide on the steps of adressing this kind of design challenges for lay people like WhatAboutScience that are interested in these questions!