I have a bunch of thoughts on this, some quick ones:
The reading experience on wikis is very heavily optimized for skimming. This causes some of the following design choices:
Longer line-width causes a more distinct right-outline of the text, this makes it easier to orient while quickly scrolling past things
Since most text is never going to be read, a lot of text is smaller, and the line-lengths are longer to vertically compress the text, making it overall faster to navigate around different sections of the page
The content aims to be canonical and comprehensive, both of these cause a much more concrete distinction between “the article” and “the discussion” since you need to apply the canonicity and comprehensiveness criteria to only the article and not the discussion
Because of the focus on comprehensiveness, you generally want to impose structure not only on every single article, but on the whole knowledge graph. But in order to do that, you need to actually bring the knowledge graph into a format you can constrain, which you can only do for internal links, and not external links.
I have a bunch of thoughts on this, some quick ones:
The reading experience on wikis is very heavily optimized for skimming. This causes some of the following design choices:
Longer line-width causes a more distinct right-outline of the text, this makes it easier to orient while quickly scrolling past things
Since most text is never going to be read, a lot of text is smaller, and the line-lengths are longer to vertically compress the text, making it overall faster to navigate around different sections of the page
The content aims to be canonical and comprehensive, both of these cause a much more concrete distinction between “the article” and “the discussion” since you need to apply the canonicity and comprehensiveness criteria to only the article and not the discussion
Because of the focus on comprehensiveness, you generally want to impose structure not only on every single article, but on the whole knowledge graph. But in order to do that, you need to actually bring the knowledge graph into a format you can constrain, which you can only do for internal links, and not external links.