User blog comment:Rupert Giles/Layout Changes: Breakpoints and Typography/@comment-5275700-20150520212753/@comment-26304798-20150520223725

I still don't understand how increasing the font size only for the largest screens is somehow going to help readability on tablets and other mobile devices. Please tell me you see how that doesn't make sense. The entire point of responsive design is that you can specify exactly, down to the last detail, how you want something to look on a certain size of screen. There is absolutely no need to make it uniform across screens, in fact, responsive design does the exact opposite.

Secondly, and I'll say this again, increasing the font size to artificially meet that special number of words per line is insanely bad practice. The number of words per line rule is a good practise on its own, however there are other means of achieving that and to add to that, it doesn't always apply. Especially with large bodies of text with a lot of information, such as Wiki articles, that golden rule isn't so golden. Wiki's have used the old layout for years, hell, Wikipedia still uses it and does just fine. It's not needed at all. If only because the golden words rule only works if there's nothing else on that line. The moment there's an image or an infobox to the side the number of words is cut in half and readability is reduced instead of increased. There is generally an infobox at the top of almost every article, so the readability of almost every article already starts off badly. In short, your entire philosophy doesn't keep in mind that a lot of lines in a wiki article don't run the full page width. That phylisophy ONLY works if images and other such things are introduced on seperate lines so they don't interupt the content. Please pass that information on to your designers because it is a FATAL flaw in your design.

However, if you absolutely want to adhere to that special words per line rule, increasing the font is NOT the way to go. There are things such as css justify or writing a bit of Javascript to force only an X number of words per line. There are so many solutions to this (non existant) problem that increasing the font size is seriously such a cheap and cutting corners method. If anything the response from the people USING your Wikias should be enough to tell you that people don't like it. Instead of telling us we're wrong about it, ask yourself why we don't like it.