Wikipedia – the popular multilingual free online encyclopedia and one of the 10 most visited websites in the world, accessed by billions of people every month – is finally getting its first major redesign.
Initially, the site announced that it would introduce a new interface in 2021, but it turned out to be a very complicated and lengthy process. The main goal of the update is to improve the overall viewing experience, make it “modern” and match the desktop version with the mobile version.
To develop the new interface, the Wikimedia Foundation involved more than 30 different groups of volunteers from around the world, including countries such as India, Indonesia, Ghana and Argentina.
As you can see, the updated design streamlines the page, which now gets more white space. The search bar is located at the top, almost in the center of the page (moved from the upper right corner). Also, when you type a query, the panel generates a preview image and description (the old search tried to auto-fill the query with some text).
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The Wikimedia Foundation says that this update led to a 30% increase in user searches at the time of testing – a reminder that even small changes can affect real-world use of the product.
Another significant change concerns the language bar, which has now been moved to the upper right corner (in the old interface, you had to scroll the left sidebar to switch languages).
The sidebar with links can now be collapsed – to change the maximum line width and more convenient reading without distractions.
The content of each Wikipedia article moves as you scroll down the page. This makes it easier to move between different parts of the article to further explore the topic. Again, useful, but not world-changing.
With all that, you can return the old interface, because the updates were not to everyone’s taste – but for this, the user must create an account on Wikipedia, and then change the settings.
Wikipedia got a new design and it looks awful pic.twitter.com/niFNhB0KgU
— Gojira Enjoyer???️? (@LibertyKing76) January 18, 2023
Considering the size of Wikipedia’s readership, it is obvious that the organization tried not to make destructive changes. Today, the online encyclopedia offers more than 58 million articles in more than 300 languages, which are viewed nearly 16 billion times a month.
The update is available for 94% of the 318 active language desktop versions of Wikipedia.
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Source: TechCrunch, PCMag
