Fair point on the editing set-up. I'm pretty experienced now with wiki markup, but that took time.
What's she on about when she talks of "mind calming images"? What's with the Geocities comparison? Wikipedia is a minimalist and utilitarian layout. Geocities was the land that aesthetics forgot, and helped popularise eye-raping text on a tiled background. Really, why did people do that? I wondered if they had a monitor calibrated drastically differently to mine, or did they never read their own websites? How can anyone think that blue text on a starry background is pleasant to read, and auto-playing midi files? God, how did we survive?
There are plenty other sites she can visit for her modern web experience. Want dynamic stuff that breaks traditional browsing paradigms? Sure, you got it. How about over-use of flash and other crap? Coming right up, albeit in smaller amounts these days due to anyone with an ounce of sense blocking Flash content except for sites where it'll be used to provide the service being sought - not just advertising or "artistic" flair. Want Javascript/AJAX stuff that'll send your cycles climbing, and give you something that looks nice but is in fact far less useful that the old site? Sure, and why not come to Slashdot to see an example of how geeks can build a UI to solve a problem that never really existed - all while neglecting proper support for unicode and touch screen devices. Did anyone at Geeknet not even try browsing Slashdot on a touchscreen device? Trying to adjust filtering is a pain, and why is there an option at the bottom to opt out of the mobile version if it doesn't work? God I hate mobile versions of sites - particularly when I can't opt out of them.
Ironically The Atlantic reminds me of Wikipedia design. Nice simple layout that doesn't detract from the content. Wikipedia works because its layout doesn't get in my way (except maybe when they fuck around "mobile friendly" layouts.