SAN FRANCISCO: Wikipedia has been an integral part of web culture for nearly twenty years, letting users browse the millions of text-heavy entries in the crowd-sourced encyclopedia.
The overall look of Wikipedia on desktop is getting a makeover for the first time in a decade to make the site more approachable for new users.
Wikimedia Foundation, the site’s parent company, announced in a blog post that the changes will happen “incrementally over a long period of time,” allowing users to test the new features before they are officially roll out, and it plans to redesign the entire look of the desktop version by the end of 2021.
Wikipedia has remained a critical and widely-used resource for knowledge across the world for the past two decades. The site has expanded significantly to contain unparalleled amounts of reliable and thorough information, including 53 million articles across over 300 languages.
“Wikipedia’s content has grown rapidly, our interface has not kept pace. We’re proud that our website is more direct, simple, and advertisement-free than the rest of the internet,” said Olga Vasileva, Lead Product Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation.
“Yet, the design of desktop Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects have not seen any substantive changes for the past 10 years, leaving certain elements of the site’s navigation feeling clunky and overwhelming to readers and editors whose main purpose is to create, learn, and curate content.”
It said the desktop design is important to new users who have come to the internet for the first time over the last decade. To these users, much of the wide range of functionality on the site can feel overwhelming and difficult to understand.
Wikimedia has began a multi-year project to improve the desktop interface. It said the forthcoming changes to the desktop include a reconfigured logo, collapsible sidebar, table of contents and more. These changes will happen over a long period of time and are timed with Wikipedia’s 20th birthday celebrations next year.
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