On Sun, 11 Dec 2011 15:01:33 +0000, Charles Matthews wrote: > That said, I deprecate getting "design" issues mixed up with others. The > use of emotive terms such as cold and unfriendly implies things about > intention and fault that aren't exactly helpful. I don't know whether > arguing that WP is "sui generis" is defensive or not. I can think of > several issues where it allows a reply like "you'd have more of a case if > WP were ...", to fill in to taste with "staffed by paid workers"/"for > profit"/"offering a different service"/"run on a billion dollar > budget"/"Facebook", etc. These answers seem to me to offer analytical > insight.
While the design and user interface of Wikipedia certainly has things that could stand improvement, I generally like the fact that it's not run by a "billion dollar budget" commercial outfit brimming with meddlesome marketing and management types and artsy graphical designers, aimed at producing a site design that looks cool when demoed in PowerPoint presentations, shoves lots of annoying, intrusive ads at the user and is explicitly designed and structured to maximize this even at the expense of actual content, and works well (if at all) only in the particular browsers and platforms targeted by the developer. Those sites are hard to navigate, hard to read, slow to load, prone to crashing your browser, go out of their way to interfere with normal browser operations like caching and back/forward buttons by having crazy contraptions of scripts to reinvent those wheels in an inferior way, and are generally a headache to use in comparison with Wikipedia. -- == Dan == Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/ Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
