EG Redesign - Ideas and Suggestions?

[sandcastles]

My only problem with it is the text in the images is often illegible.  Everything else is fine.

Can you please explain what you mean by this a bit more?

Are you saying a given image may include text within itself that is illegible or that the captions for images are often illegible?

Thanks!

Todd

A given image may include text which is illegible or partially illegible.  Even on full magnification the words in the image are often only partially legible.
I don't recall having trouble with any captions, only the lettering inside the image.


After having posted all the links below, I tried clicking on the images for each and that produces a separate image which is far more legible--except it's still so small I have to magnify it a lot.   I hadn't thought of doing that at first.  It would be nice to have that instruction somewhere on the page.

So the comments below are for the images themselves, when I did not click on the image.

Regions of Space
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45bc1dcf97592
The names of the regions are blurry.  The ones in all caps are a little more legible, and magnifying the screen image helps a little.


Inner Sphere
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45bcbcab90032
This one is a little better, but still blurry.


Galactography
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b17e0030cdc
The first image on this page is better.

Further down on this page is an image of the Milky Way galaxy  It's more legible.  On the upper left and lower right of the image are the words "Milky Way" and "Follow Sol."  Below those are words I could barely read at high magnification.



Terragen Sphere
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4caf0ce9584d0
These are difficult to read even at high magnification.


Homo Superior
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45beaea1aae3a
This is more legible at higher magnification, but still blurry.

Tweak

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45beb1fcc5ba6
Very blurry, even at high magnification.


Goliaths
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/47ec44d00db9b
More readable, but still blurry at higher magnification.



Biont
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/497e8c30715ea
At higher magnification the image becomes blurry and it's hard to distinguish features on the smaller individuals.

This doesn't have any text on the image, but I have a request.  I don't remember what the term is but if I hover the cursor over something in an image, a little infobox appears with information about that item in the picture.  The xkcd comic has that, and some instagram photos identify a person in the photo when you hover the cursor over the person.  We could have that to identify each of the individuals in the picture for the Biont article.


Serpens Region
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/47843e18da23b
The names are legible at the highest magnification of the monitor screen, but some of the names still aren't legible.  The names are in different colors, and I don't know what the different colors represent.


The pictures for the Norma, Perseus and Sagittarius Arm articles are easier to read.
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/46dcc2163fbcf

[radtech497]

Just so I'm building a correct mental picture here - Are you suggesting that the major section pages (such as what you mention above) would look something like the new main page, with a single large background image and then some sort of text and/or navigation controls sitting on top of that? Or that the background would have something like a 'collage' of smaller images relating to the subject matter? Or something else?

In a word, yes. If it is possible to cycle through background images specific to the section, as is done on the main page, that would be a plus. The goal of this suggestion is to create a unified visual theme for the website as a whole, hopefully one that is both visually interesting and that communicates a sense of the setting.

On a related note - Our current plan is to retire the current retro look of the EG across the board, although we are also thinking to preserve (or at least give a nod to) some specific design elements of the current EG. Not sure exactly what that might look like yet, though.

Perhaps the Archives could feature the current content format, perhaps as part of a description of how the OAUP has "evolved" over the years since its founding. Speaking of archives, how difficult is it to make them searchable? If it is more trouble than it's worth, then that idea can be tabled until some future date ....

Radtech497

[sandcastles]

When I do a search, I get search results; I click on a link, read the article, then I want to go back to the search results. But when I click to go back to the search results, the page states, Document Expired. It would be nice if we could possibly avoid that.

I don't mind the list of associated articles at the bottom, but it doesn't seem to distinguish between articles with lots of information and articles which only have one brief mention of a thing. The same with search results, don't indicate which articles have just one brief mention of something.

[Drashner1]

After having posted all the links below, I tried clicking on the images for each and that produces a separate image which is far more legible--except it's still so small I have to magnify it a lot.   I hadn't thought of doing that at first.  It would be nice to have that instruction somewhere on the page.

So the comments below are for the images themselves, when I did not click on the image.

The intent really is that people click on the images to see them fully. Given that the images themselves come from multiple authors and were created over the last 20 years and we didn't/don't really have a hard set of editorial guidelines for images I'm not sure how much we can do about some of these issues.

Not saying we can't/won't do anything - literally saying I don't know. Will need to talk to Trond and possibly loop in Steve and the Editors to discuss this.

I would imagine it wouldn't be too hard to add something about clicking to see a larger image.

Re magnifying the images - I'm not sure what you mean here. I would think that this would partly depend on how large your screen is. There is also likely some limit on how big we can make the images when they are clicked and a factor of trying to find a 'workable medium' across multiple types of devices. Unless Trond set this up to some industry standard I'm not aware of (which is entirely possible).

Again, this is something we'll have to discuss.

What sort of device and browser are you using when viewing the images?

Todd

[Drashner1]

When I do a search, I get search results; I click on a link, read the article, then I want to go back to the search results. But when I click to go back to the search results, the page states, Document Expired.  It would be nice if we could possibly avoid that.

I'll have to ask Trond about this and what we might do about it.

I don't mind the list of associated articles at the bottom, but it doesn't seem to distinguish between articles with lots of information and articles which only have one brief mention of a thing.  The same with search results, don't indicate which articles have just one brief mention of something.

The associated articles list is created manually by the Editors and so is based on the judgement of the individual Editors who created it or may update/add to it at any given time.

I'm not sure that there is any way to automagically make the website judge what is or is not a 'sufficient' amount of information to justifying being in the list of search results.

Todd

[Drashner1]

In a word, yes. If it is possible to cycle through background images specific to the section, as is done on the main page, that would be a plus. The goal of this suggestion is to create a unified visual theme for the website as a whole, hopefully one that is both visually interesting and that communicates a sense of the setting.

From a technical perspective, I would need to talk to Trond about this since I have no idea what the technical challenges of this would be nor would it would 'cost' in terms of having hundreds of pages all doing the image cycling thing, and doing it with different sets of images for each.

Note that there are around 300 Topic pages in the EG so if we had even one image per Topic that would be 300+ large size images and (if we had 6 per page such as we have on the Main Page) 1800+ large images that would need to be loaded, kept track of, and presumably updated from time to time. The Main Page tool can actually support both more and less than 6 images, but this gives some idea of the scope of doing this.

This is not to say that this isn't workable/doable. Just that it might (or might not) have a number of 'costs' associated with it or with doing it at scale.

Perhaps the Archives could feature the current content format, perhaps as part of a description of how the OAUP has "evolved" over the years since its founding. Speaking of archives, how difficult is it to make them searchable? If it is more trouble than it's worth, then that idea can be tabled until some future date ....

Radtech497

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean by 'archives' in this context. Do you mean these pages HERE or something else? I don't know what would be involved in making them specifically searchable and they do seem a bit small to do that. The Search bar on the Main Page uses Google and appears to pull up material from the archive when used, although I imagine you would have to know to enter relevant search terms. But I may be misunderstanding you, so asking for clarification.

I imagine we could create some kind of set of archival images of the different past looks of the project (might as well not just stop at the current one, if we're going to do it), although I don't have the know how to say what the options for doing that might be. Perhaps it would work better as something like one of the art galleries, which screenshots of the different past versions of the project? That could be linked into the Archives as well. Or only from the Archives, I suppose.

Thoughts?

Todd

[sandcastles]

I'm using Windows 10 PC, and an HP monitor about 8 inches high by 17 inches across.  I can magnify what's on the screen by using
CTRL- and the plus sign on the keyboard.  That helps for many of the images.

On some sites--I can't think of a specific example--I see only part of the magnified image on the screen and as I move the cursor I can view different parts of the magnified image.

[Andrew P.]

Would it be fiendishly difficult to port the entire EG to a more traditional wiki-style format? Or at least something with better/easier search functionality? Maybe something with fun multimedia functionalities, pop-up windows, etc.?

I agree with previous statements to the effect that the current aesthetic of the EG is great as-is, but I feel like we could make the under-the-hood stuff a bit more streamlined/efficient/etc.

[ProxCenBound]

I know it would be a pain to make the transition, but on the other hand based on the reading I've been doing, wikis are way easier to work with, at least for editors (setting one up is beyond me though). Creating links is as simple as [[brackets]], and a merged article can be done simply by turning the old article into a redirect - no need to hunt down old links. Categories can be used at the bottom of the page to sort articles into topics.

Vandalism, like Wikipedia has, can be prevented by simply only allowing trusted users to have edit access - same as we do now with the CMS; we would *not* be the encyclopedia anyone can edit. And unlike the CMS, viewing and restoring past versions is trivially easy, simply by clicking on "view history" - a useful feature for those times the CMS mysteriously eats our detailed edits. With this greater reversibility we could also extend edit access to more users to correct typos for us (of which we still have many - I see them in almost every article I read), and monitor changes using the wiki-wide Recent Changes feature on the left, and rescind edit access if needed.

Here's the free, open-source software used by Wikipedia and the Galactic Library: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

Galactic Library, for reference: https://www.galacticlibrary.net/wiki/Main_Page

I'm not certain, but I'm sure there are ways to make it so the background isn't garishly white like Wikipedia, and instead resembles our current gray and swirly blue style, which I really like.

A big question for assessing the difficulty of porting all that content is: how many EG articles do we have, and what is the size distribution of them? Like, even if there are thousands, if like 90% of them are stubs from the very early days, that's easier than if most of them are lengthy. And even many of the ones that aren't stubs are only 2 or 3 paragraphs long. There might even be ways nowadays to write a script to do it for us - scrape content from the EG and plug it into identically named articles on a wiki, adding double brackets for linked text and maybe even adding pictures - though this would require true programming skills.

All in all this might be worth asking Trond about, and possibly creating a tiny proof-of-concept wiki, if that is easy to do.

[ProxCenBound]

Putting this in a separate post since it's independent of the previous matter:

A little while ago Selden suggested possibly using an LLM or other AI to comb through the EG text and report back what it thinks are errors. While false positives would no doubt exist to some extent, this would be a very useful tool to help us manage the large and growing EG. If such a thing is possible or reasonably easy to make I do not know, but it also might be worth a chat with Trond.