Dylan Mullins | UI/UX Designer

Wikipedia, Now Featuring More “Social”

by Dylan Mullins on May 1, 2011 — No Comments

 

I have no clue how much Wikipedia permeates your life, but for me it is an information consumable that I could not survive without.  Wikipedia has become a part of our modern lexicon: much like White Out is synonymous for correction fluid; Xerox to a photocopy; search to “Google it”; the word research almost certainly results in an immediate need to “Wikipedia it.”  Wikipedia is a nearly infinite information wellspring, serving as one part media outlet, and more recently, one part social dialogue.

You see, I spend a lot of time researching new things online.  Most often it begins at Wikipedia.  That research leads to information and data discoveries that are being hyper-evolved in real-time, all around the world, by real people, each with opinions of their own.  That sole fact has persisted as the crux of a heated debate against Wikipedia since its inception.  Many people have gone out of their way to debase Wikipedia, claiming it is more “truthiness” than factual information.  This changed somewhat a few years back when the Wikimedia Board was founded, and contributions started seeing a lot more scrutiny by the internal Wikipedia team’s certified moderators.  In addition, I personally feel like Jimmy Wales has always done a great job of keeping his “Trust Us” face on, and being the respectable figurehead of this organization.  To me, he personifies transparency about issues concerning Wikipedia, and I have never once felt like my donations were going to anything other than improving the service Wikipedia provides to me as an end-user.

This weekend I was doing more digital clean up, and stumbled across a tag in Delicious labeled “Knowledge.”  Inside, I found a virtual treasure chest of gems (Wikipedia articles) that I had never found time to read.  Clicking through them, I eventually landed at the anchor-linked footer of the article, “Door”.  I can’t for the life of me remember why I was looking at an informational page on doors (perhaps when researching archways for The Ronin Agency identity project), but in that footer I saw a neat new feature I had not seen before called “Rate this page.”  I did some digging around and it turned up almost nothing.  One thing I am sure of though is that it’s very cool to see Wikipedia engaging users in this new way.  It appears that in an attempt to be more “open,” and more transparent about the validity of their content, Wikipedia has added this social voting feature to a large number of pages throughout their database.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve been using Wikipedia since it first kicked off publicly, and I don’t ever remember seeing this device.  Not all of the articles on Wikipedia have this feature, but I have quickly gotten into the habit of looking for it on pages I visit, and filling in the information when I do stumble across it.

You might be asking yourself, “Why does this matter at all?” Well, there is a lot of important information out there on Wikipedia, not just fun lists like “List of films that most frequently use the word ‘Fuck’”.  These more important informational articles have to be monitored and revised constantly, as facts change or evolve.  On a similar side of that coin, a lot of articles on Wikipedia are closed for public editing or commentary.  Since these articles are closed to the public, this leaves a majority of us users without any way to positively contribute to the content we come across on Wikipedia.  This tool puts a little bit more power back in the hands of the average reader.  As much as I hate to sound “buzzwordy,” that’s pretty Web 2.0 and I like it.  A few years late, yes, but a great leap forward nonetheless.

If you think Wikipedia is already a big deal, try to think for a moment how much more important it could become as more features like this are added.  I believe Wikipedia could help bridge the technological generation chasm (can we honestly call it a “gap” anymore when the divide continues to grow exponentially by the day?) between people my age and younger, and our respective parents and grandparents.

It’s not clear yet what these new tools will accomplish in the long run—there is scarce information out there about the new social voting tools, quietly rolled out in September of 2010.  If you have more info on this, please prove me wrong.  I searched for a good 30 minutes before giving up.

Unfortunately, the “Rate this page” module exists only in the footer of article pages, so I have a strong feeling most users won’t notice it unless they read articles in full.  It is my hope that this post makes at least a few other people aware of the new feature, and we can start seeing what effect social voting has on Wikipedia content as more users begin to interact with it.

To see an example of the page rating feature, you can visit this deeply enthralling article on doors (</sarcasm>).  And if you’re not already keyed in to what’s going on in the Wikipedia world, here are some Twitter feeds that might pique your interest:

Useful Bookmarklets for Web Design and Development

by Dylan Mullins on April 24, 2011 — 5 Comments

Interesting weather we’re having here in Northern Virginia right now. It’s 82 °F one minute, then suddenly it’s a cool, lightly-rainy 62 °F the next, and by the time I finished writing this entry it had poured heavily, leaving behind a nice grassy smell.  As we roll slowly into summer, today is a good day for enjoying my latest beer obsession and doing some digital “spring cleaning.” My wish list for today was originally: get a grip on my wildly growing bookmarks list, get the RSS feed for this journal to syndicate more easily, and spruce up some other digital artifacts (thinking of trying to migrate my iTunes library management to Dropbox). While dusting off my bookmarks I started noticing the large number of bookmarklets I use on any given day for web design and development, so I decided to share some of my favorites today.

Rather than try to explain the concept of what a bookmarklet is for those not already familiar, I’ll just lift the citation from Wikipedia: “A bookmarklet is an applet, a small computer application, stored as the URL of a bookmark in a web browser or as a hyperlink on a web page. The term is a portmanteau of the terms bookmark and applet. Whether bookmarklet utilities are stored as bookmarks or hyperlinks, they are designed to add one-click functionality to a browser or web page. When clicked, a bookmarklet performs some function, one of a wide variety such as a search query or data extraction. Usually the applet is a JavaScript program.”

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What The Font Took So Long?

by Dylan Mullins on April 21, 2011 — No Comments

This post originally began as an in-depth evaluation of the varying options available in the modern landscape of font embedding.  Then I decided (after trashing a lot of paragraphs of writing) that I probably shouldn’t be talking about or advocating technologies that are outdated; namely, Cúfon, sIFR and FLIR.  With over fifteen digital years behind me, it’s only been in the last two where I’ve really felt like the web has been moving in the right direction, so I don’t want to burden the great story of these advances by spinning backwards the wheel of time.  Back on topic, one of the most important improvements I’ve witnessed has been the unified goal of tackling how our web development community handles transitioning non-standard fonts to the web.

In the two(-ish) years that have passed since Typekit was announced there has been a massive unveiling of similar competitive products—fonts as a service, not just as a tool.  At first, this left a lot designers and developers wondering who would embrace these new technologies if marketing and standardization became so fragmented by the myriad providers.  In fact, I recall a post I read last year—from one of our industry’s “rock stars,” who seemed almost gleeful in ripping it apart—positing that web font licensing would be shot down by font creators faster than it could gain any remarkable traction.  A likely argument, but it turns out everyone involved is playing pretty well together.  Font foundries have paired up with providers to make available a large chunk of their fonts for web work, leaving the discussion centered (mostly) around, “Who has the best font collection for my need?”  That’s a pretty subjective question, so I’ll leave that for someone else to delve into.  In fact, new web font technologies have become so popular a topic that a search for “web fonts” no longer takes you to Wikipedia as the first result.  Instead, Google’s own open source solution—Google Web Fonts—teeters back and forth between the #1 and #2 search result on any given day.

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Dropbox: Updates To 25 Million Users

by Dylan Mullins on April 19, 2011 — 3 Comments

Yet another product I couldn’t live without shipped a significant update this weekend, and this time it’s really a cause for celebration.  The cloud host and S-a-a-S provider, Dropbox, pushed out new versions of their iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch applications with new features that build upon an already rich offering.  Visually, Dropbox v1.4 sees a return of the lower action button row for the iPhone/iPod Touch, and a return to the tabbed navigation UI for the iPad.  Functionally, the latest release now allows for users to batch upload photos, set upload destination folders, and best of all you can upload to Dropbox from most applications running in iOS or OSX.  To add a cherry on top, the version roll-out was accompanied by an announcement from Dropbox that they’ve eclipsed 25 million users to-date—quite impressive for a product that has been under the radar for the majority of its 4 year lifespan.  I have been an avid Dropbox Pro user for about 2 years, and highly recommend it for cloud file sharing.  To join Dropbox, click this referral link to get your free 2GB account right now.