Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

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I think there's a middle ground. Providing clear options and deliberate choices can be done through not having a thousand options and buttons.

Wikipedia is a clear example of not taking this into consideration. There's a hundred links mixed with the text, and buttons and doodads everywhere around it, which makes it very clear to actually think about what you want to do.

If you compare Encarta '96 with Wikipedia:

<https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/encarta.png>

<https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/wikipedia.png>

It's clearly very different. The Encarta design is a lot more quiet. If you're reading, then you are reading. There are sparse inline links, but nothing near the shotgun linkedness of Wikipedia.

I've experimented with stripping down Wikipedia, producing this:

<https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki/Plato>

It's definitely several steps too far (but taking things too far is the best way to get the feel for an idea), but I find that much easier to read, because the choices are moved out of the text and into the bottom of the text. That is, you read first, and decide what to do next once you are finished reading.

The Encarta version is much better if you want to learn about Plato, while Wikipedia makes it much easier to learn about thing related to Plato.

The notion that the relation to other things is at least as important as the thing itself permeates Wikipedia. Many smaller articles, like e.g. Differentiable Programming [1] probably link to more topics than the article itself has words.

I think a "stripped down" Wikipedia is an experiment worth trying, but it would serve a subtly different purpose, with some use cases being left behind and some being better served.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiable_programming

I think the big problem with Wikipedia's design is that it caters to too many audiences with disparate needs using the same interface, both reading and navigating and cross-referencing and editing.

I think perhaps having multiple views for different needs would be a way forward.

> I think the big problem with Wikipedia's design is that it caters to too many audiences with disparate needs using the same interface, both reading and navigating and cross-referencing and editing.

> I think perhaps having multiple views for different needs would be a way forward.

I think what this thread is missing is that Encarta and Wikipedia are vastly different products. If Wikipedia had multiple views for different needs it would literally die, because it's community edited. If its UI encouraged staying withing a narrow lane, then it would have even more problems with getting readers to cross over to being editors.

I read something once that when you come across a link, your mind subconsciously hesitates whether or not to open it and that these thoughts detract from your focus on the material at hand.

I often wonder if it would be more beneficial for websites to transition to footnotes with all pertinent links at the bottom of the page.

All I see on the Marginalia Plato article is a site that forces an uncomfortably narrow article width on me, while eschewing almost all the advantages of hypertext in the name of some ill-conceived notion of "quieter reading".

I'm not saying it's all bad, though - it's something that could be an option offered to the unfortunate people with attention deficit disorder.

The forced text width, however, is inexcusable.

Yeah I think that's probably from my own habit of never using full screen windows. Though I'm not sure how to deal with the fact that it's very hard to read long lines of text. Most printed books, newspapers, and so forth use that width (max 60ch) specifically because it's hard to follow lines longer than that. I chose to follow book guidelines specifically because that format has been largely stable for some thousand years and is at this point the gold standard for legibility. Usually when things stagnate for that long, it's not because nobody has thought to try something different in all that time.

Maybe multiple columns could be an option, I guess. Not sure how to do that well with varying paragraph sizes, though.

On Firefox mobile, it's more like 11 characters wide. Pretty much unusable.

Hmm, strange. It doesn't have these proportions? <https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/encyclopedia-mobile.png>

I sadly can't diagnose since my phone isn't powerful enough to run Firefox. Looks as intended on Firefox desktop with emulation mode, though.

Huh. It looks fine now. Did you change anything?

Not a thing.

Works for me on Firefox for Android (Firefox for iOS being just a safari skin). I get 6-7 words per line (looks like the site authors emulated screenshot), so like 40 or so characters

I'd prefer if web designers used relative max width of maybe 80 or 90%, and left it to users to resize their browser windows accordingly. But I realize that is a pipe dream, people are too lazy for that, so I just use custom CSS browser extensions to adjust this on sites I visit regularly.

I also actually prefer wider lines, as I don't find following them difficult, and prefer wider lines and having to do less scrolling. It's also fun seeing how a lot of random blog articles which seem long in a narrow layout are in fact very short. :)

I like the page and, instead of finding the fixed width “inexcusable”, see it as an element of tasteful design that makes the text easy to read, as you’ve chosen an ideal width. The justification would work better if there were hyphenation, though.

Not much to add except wanted to say that I enjoyed becoming aware of the impact Wikipedia's design decision had on me, as a reader.

Seeing the encarta/marginalia version vs the wikipedia one really drives home the point. It's interesting how the design had a strong impact on my experience, and yet I never really noticed it before.

I feel a bit like a fish suddenly aware of the water they're in.

I was confused by the claim that the Encarta version is quieter until I read that it was because of the inline links. I thought the Wikipedia version was quieter because it doesn't have a distracting background image. I think this confusion is evidence that inline links are actually not distracting. I don't feel I have to make a decision whenever I see one because I know they'll still be there later.

Maybe it's individual variations? I struggle immensely reading text with inline links. I immediately start skimming and my attention is strongly drawn to the linked words.

Maybe you can add custom CSS rules that make links the same color? I also much prefer the wikipedia interface to the alternatives.

This pretty much is a custom CSS. I was also more than a bit annoyed by the huge downloads and 30 second page loads.

If you want to strip away the MediaWiki adornments and editing/interactivity tools from Wikipedia, you just have to go to the mobile page:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato

It is still consumption-oriented and stripped down, but retains far more non-textual information than your experiment.

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