Proposal: A denser page layout

What changes

Pages get less padding and less decoration, closer to Wikipedia. Agpedia keeps its own fonts and colours.

• No card around the article. Today the article sits in a box with a border and a shadow, inside a padded page. The article now sits directly on the page.
• Less space above the content. The header is lower, and the title is smaller and higher.
• A wider text column on computers.
• A lighter sidebar. Page checks, Version history and Contents keep their place. They lose their boxes and are separated by thin lines.
• The article comes first on phones. Today a phone shows the search field and three boxes before the title. In the proposal, the title comes right under the header. The sidebar boxes move below the article, and search becomes an icon in the header.
• Tabs under the title. Article and Discuss on the left, Edit and History on the right, as on Wikipedia. Discuss shows the number of comments when there are any.
• One line per change in Recent changes and the other lists of changes.

Commons ↗

The numbers

Measured on the Belt buckle article and on Recent changes, before and after.

The text size stays at 16 px.

The Edit tab

Today, the only edit link is at the very end of the article. A reader who is signed out sees "Log in or Create account to edit" there.

In the proposal, everyone sees Edit under the title:

• Editors go straight to the edit form, as today.
• Everyone else gets a short page that explains how to help: create an account, wait for editing approval while Agpedia is in its pilot phase, then improve the article with an AI agent, or make a quick fix by hand.

The Actions line at the end of the article stays, because the end of an article is a natural moment to act. Comments also stay at the bottom.

Why

• Readers see the content sooner. On a phone, a reader now scrolls past a search field and three boxes before reaching the title.
• Long lists are easier to scan. A 760 px high screen shows about 8 changes in Recent changes today. It would show about 14.
• Edit is easy to find. An Edit tab in the same place as on Wikipedia tells readers that they can improve the page.

What stays

• The fonts: Source Serif 4 for text, IBM Plex Sans for menus and labels.
• The colours: the teal links, the red links for missing pages, the warm paper tone (lighter and without the gradient).
• The text size and line length for reading. The column is wider, but lines stay readable.

How it works

• The changes are in the site's style sheet and in the page layout. Article text does not change.
• The tabs are plain links. They work without JavaScript and with the keyboard.
• The mock-up was made by applying a style override to the live site. Article photos are replaced by grey boxes, for licensing reasons.

Not in this proposal

• A dark mode.
• A visual editor.
• Changes to the home page and the forum, beyond the shared header and spacing.