Asklemmy @lemmy.ml dysprosium @lemmy.dbzer0.com 1mo ago

how come there is no "appearance" button on the English wikipedia?

The "appearance" button seen on Dutch wikipedia is able to change the SIZE of the font (text) and the width of the article. This is extremely nice to have, but it's not there on any English article...

48 comments

I don't know what the answer to your question is, but I love the way tekst is spelt.
- I am Groot.
  
  *Ik ben
- yea I guess it has a visual ring to it
- Pagina
  
  Breed groot pagina
  
  Fun fact: in Dutch the word pagina is pronounced exactly the same as vagina
- Besides Dutch, tekst is a word used in Albanian, Danish, Estonian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish
  
  Also in all Cyrillic languages since those don't have an X letter and have to use ks (кс) instead
  
  Lithuanian has tekstas it is just two letters away from tekst .
  
  And in Finnish we use "teksti"
  
  SMS is "tekstiviesti"
- Scandinavian languages also spell it like that, as it's closely related to Dutch without (much) french influence.
  
  The only words I can remember that we spell with X as place names such as Texas and Mexico.
  
  Edit: dutch, not german
  
  Yeah, I speak German, but in German it's spelt Text.
  
  In Swedish we spell it text.
Current Setting: Breed Groot
- ~~Droom groot~~ Breed groot
It does have it but its in the settings menu instead. I believe the different language versions of Wikipedia are maintained by different groups so that's probably why.
- this settings page does not exist on desktop, only on the mobile version. If I go to en.m.wikipedia.org I can see it on desktop, but it's not on en.wikipedia.org. It also does not save settings from mobile version to desktop version...
Individual Wikipedias have individual designs and Individual design features.
- is there no overhaul to copy ideas from one to another? Or overseer to somewhat keep a consistent theming?
  
  Technically these kinds of things are decided by the Wikimedia Foundation but they'll usually not do things that the editing community of the local wiki doesn't want.
  
  In 2014 the WMF forced a new software feature (Media Viewer) on all wikis and enforced this by "superprotecting" the JavaScript on the German-language Wikipedia so local admins (who at one point even blocked the Deputy Director of the WMF from editing) couldn't disable the new media viewer. The WMF doesn't really want these kinds of constitutional crises to happen again.
  
  I remember when "new" Wikipedia came out with big press I was confused because it had already been in use on the French wiki for months.
  
  My guess is as the biggest wiki, the English wiki is naturally more conservative on the rollout of new features.
This is all a conspiracy by big Font.
buys Dutch bathroom scale and turns into Marvel character

Ik ben Groot!
- ben, not bin
  
  Okeydoke, fixed!
- I actually wonder if he's still called that in Dutch.
  
  You and me both 😁
  
  Update: I checked and apparently they pronunciation is significantly different so that he doesn't in fact just go around bragging about how big he is 😆
Maybe it's a default feature for all non-English languages to account for potential writing system differences? May not make as much a difference for other languages using the Latin alphabet, but maybe for East Asian scripts or Arabic or Hindi etc., they don't want to assume the default layout is as readable as it is for English?

Just a shot-in-the-dark guess.
- well the english wiki does have the wide layout option through the square button on the bottom left, ever since the new layout revamp. Just not the font size option.
TIL we have it. That is very useful, thank you!
I like to use Wikiwand, it's a browser addon that overhauls the wikipedia UI.
- I was curious so I added it and now Wikipedia is full of ads. No like.
  
  That's weird, I don't see any ads when using it. Are you using the official extension? https://www.wikiwand.com/
There's a button in the bottom right to make the page wide. As for text size, I guess it's kind of redundant since you can just zoom in the page.
- using the browser zoom makes the layout narrower again, as if it's actively trying to reverse the wide layout by the button in the bottom right. It makes the page very weird looking. Just far from ideal.
  
  EDIT: it's also very inconvenient since my browser saves the zoom level per website (not between en.wikipedia and nl.wikipedia) so the zoom would always be off when going from one article to one in the other language.
Maybe the firefox reader button can help but it kind of messes the whole formatting of the page

48 comments