Wikipedia is the most classic idea of the internet you could possibly imagine: function over aesthetics, a treasure trove of knowledge rooted in homage to The Library of Alexandria, a website that you can really explore (you know, like how the internet is for exploring… an idea that has long been abandoned by most!). My friend calls it a relaxation medium – it’s serene, a place where you can effortlessly glide from learning about the moon landing to all of a sudden: exploding trousers. “Wikipedia pre-dates the attention economy,” says Justin Scherer, UX designer at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that supports Wikipedia and its visual design system. There are no infinite doomscrolls, only enriching rabbit holes that avoid those all-too-common psychic blasts of negative energy you get from Instagram reels.
According to Annie Rauwerda’s excellent article on the controversial Vector 2022, Wikipedia’s most recent redesign is barely noticeable, “but that’s the point,” says Annie on Slate. “It doesn’t look all that different than it did 23 years ago, when it was run by a few guys in an office in Florida. The text-heavy website resembles an email inbox, or Craigslist or old Reddit. It’s a barrage of straightforward white and blue text, a rather unsightly assemblage of lines and squares. It’s not trendy.” But as Justin says, “consistency goes a long way to establishing trust in a piece of software.”
One discussion around whether or not the Vector 2022 redesign should be default surpassed 90,000 words between Wikipedians, however despite all the hullabaloo, Wikipedia is still highly customisable, so anyone can use their own JavaScript to make neon backgrounds or turn links into emojis if they so wish. “Our challenge as designers is to stay true to the fundamentals of verifiably accurate encyclopedic hypertext while also supporting the changing expectations of readers,” says Justin. And that’s not all: jumping off the site completely are fan-projects such as The Wiki Reader: “a project to deliver an offline, text-only version of Wikipedia on a mobile device,” similar to the Internet-in-a-Box devices assembled by Wiki Project Med Foundation that were available on the Wikipedia Store. Or there’s WikiSpy, an endless, searchable I-spy-esque collage of over 43,000 cut-out objects and images from Wikipedia. Wikimedia runs several independent, interconnected websites that use the same engine, such as Wiktionary, a multilingual dictionary and thesaurus database, Wikibooks, a repository for free e-book textbooks and annotated texts and even Wikivoyage, a collaborative, free travel guide. The fact that all of these sister-sites feel interconnected is a testament to Wikipedia’s brand loyalty, even if the brand is quiet.