What just happened? Wikipedia is the most commonly used collaborative encyclopedia on the internet, or, as they like to say, the largest collection of open knowledge in history. Now the updated design is designed to make this knowledge even more user-friendly and accessible to people all over the world.
Wikipedia is getting a design update, the first major update to the site’s desktop interface in more than a decade. The Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that hosts Wikipedia servers and other related projects such as the MediaWiki platform, has announced a redesign just in time for Wikipedia’s 22nd anniversary (January 15).
“The content and popularity of Wikipedia have grown significantly over the past two decades,” the Foundation explains, having an information array consisting of more than 58 million articles written in more than 300 languages. Volunteers from all over the world edit and manage the free encyclopedia, and Internet users visit the site almost 16 billion times a month.
The Wikimedia Foundation cites a global analysis of digital trends for 2022, which states that the number of people not connected to the Internet has fallen below 3 billion for the first time in history. More than 5 billion Internet users are online now, and Wikipedia’s redesign was conceived to meet the needs of this “next generation of Internet users.”
The new design should make it easier for everyone, “regardless of their familiarity with the Internet,” to find and use reliable and reliable knowledge. The improved desktop interface includes a new navigation bar “table of contents”, which remains visible when users scroll down the page, a more visible link for searching and switching available languages in which the article is written, a maximum line width, which should make long texts easier to read and easier to remember.
The Wikipedia desktop now provides improved search with images and descriptions to make it easier to find articles, a new collapsible sidebar to access many of the tools that Wikipedia provides without distracting users from reading, and an updated title for registered users that will stay at the top during the text. scrolling.
The redesign of Wikipedia is the culmination of a long-term project to improve the desktop, and, like any content posted in the free encyclopedia, it was the result of the collaboration of 30 different groups of volunteers from around the world. The new design was formed based on the results of global research and user feedback and inspired by the same basic idea of knowledge equity from which the Wikimedia Foundation was born.
“Updating the Wikipedia desktop is one of the main improvements that the Wikimedia Foundation is making to help people easily access world knowledge,” said Selena Dekelmann, director of products and technology at the Wikimedia Foundation. The new features “aim to meet the needs of our increasingly diverse audience,” Dekelmann said, “while maintaining a simple and understandable feel that millions of people have trusted over the past 22 years.”
