User:Monteirobrena/MediaWiki Homepage Redesign

Name and contact information
Name: Brena Monteiro Email: monteirobrena@undefinedgmail.com IRC or IM networks/handle(s): monteirobrena Location: Belo Horizonte, Brazil Time zone: UTC−3 Typical working hours: 9 AM - 5 PM

MediaWiki Homepage Redesign

 * Announcement: Link to announcement of my proposal at the wikitech-l mailing list
 * Design Document

Deliverables
Dec. 10th - Dec. 31th (3 weeks) Jan. 1st - Jan. 29th (4 weeks) Jan. 30th - Feb. 25th (4 weeks) Feb. 26th - Mar. 10th (2 weeks)
 * Identify the main problems at current homepage.
 * Propose and discuss the solutions for this problems.
 * Investigate good lessons and inspirations in another references sites.
 * Discuss and define which existing ideias will be implemented.
 * Document what will be implemented.
 * Make prototype with the new ideias.
 * Discuss and validate final prototype.
 * Develop the prototype.
 * Discuss and validate the main page.
 * Define improvements and final adjustments.
 * Document the improvements and justifications.
 * Develop improvements to finalize main page.
 * Validate and deploy the new main page.
 * Document the final version of main page.

About you
My main professional motivation is to encourage the inclusion of women in Information Technology. I believe that disclosing and attending the OPW I can be an example for the women of my country.

I am assiduous user of Wikipedia and also use other Wikimedia Foundation projects like Wikivoyage. I'm impressed with the amount of people who work and who are aided by tools and the contents published.

Participate in the OPW is one of the way to repay benefits received and be part of this captivating community.

The most recents projects that I worked was online auction system, management system for occupational and occupational medicine, scheduling massages and system of private pension. In this projects I used C#, Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, PostgreSQL and Git.

Participation
I plan to communicate my progress through the project page, the IRC channel, the mailing list and the Talks of MediaWiki. I have habit of using GitHub to provide open source codes that I contribute. I saw that Wikimedia has several repositories on GitHub so I think the community is already accustomed to using it, too. I believe that the best way to get help is through the mailing list and IRC channel because everybody can collaborate and I could get an answer more quickly.

Past open source experience
In addition to the open sources projects that I keep on GitHub I made some contributions to projects that are stored there. The most project that I contribute is about Rails and JavaScript. Some project was a library to facilitate the development of projects and a extension to Chrome. I have custom to use a lot of open source at my projects like Git and jQuery.

I also fixed in Template:MediaWiki News, applying new formatting. My collaboration in MediaWiki can be seen here:

Template MediaWiki News History MediaWiki News Talk

Any other info
Here is the beginning of my work for the project MediaWiki Homepage Redesign. I'm identifying what can be improved and seeking innovative ideas to improve the homepage of MediaWiki.

What are the main problems you see in the current homepage?
The bigger problem in the main page is not show the power of MediaWiki. The homepage need awakening the interest to know and use it. It's necessary show how easy is use it and has a small demonstration about how the MediaWiki works would be a very good thing.

The main page could contain the answer for the questions:


 * 1) What is MediaWiki?


 * 1) How I can get it?


 * 1) How I can use it?


 * 1) Why I should use it?


 * 1) Who uses it?


 * 1) Where it is used?

The answers to these questions will guide interested people and encourage them to use MediaWiki.

In addition the current page has other minor problems:


 * Too big box to select language


 * Excess of links


 * Redundant links


 * Lots of versions for download


 * Lack of harmony in colors and icons


 * Don't transmitted any feel to visitant

Which websites do you think we should look at to find good lessons and inspiration, and why?
Ubuntu See the image with comments

The Ubuntu main page is focused in highlight its qualities and how to get it. It is also possible make a tour online to know how it works.

Sublime Text See the image with comments

The Sublime Text homepage has a demonstration of the many things it's possible do with it. This demonstration works like a video.

AngularJS See the image with comments

The AngularJS main page it's very clean and highlight the benefits to use the framework. The way to get it and contribute has a highlight, too.

The highlight in benefits and qualities is very useful because people can know what they can do with the tool and why choose MediaWiki instead of other similar tool.

What good ideas do you find at MediaWiki.org Main Page Tweaks and why do you think they should be taken into consideration?
The disclosure of statistics about use of MediaWiki is relevant because demonstrates the reliability of the tool and its acceptance by the community.
 * Various statistics about mediawiki ?

The MediaWiki homepage must answering the questions to auxiliar who search a software solution for their needs. If the main page can show the potencial of MediaWiki it is probable that more people will stay anxious to use it.
 * There's way too much text on all of these designs - I think a homepage has the purpose of answering the questions - "what problem it solves", "why i'd want to use it" (sometimes tied to who uses it) and "how i can use it". The homepages I am seeing answer those questions somewhat but the answers are very hidden and require a lot of parsing! I'd encourage a design which makes use of "below the fold text". To take some examples - http://lesscss.org/ and http://nodejs.org/ both give a clear message at the top and underneath are text heavy.

December

 * Invited the participation of community to discuss about the project in mailing list wikitech-l and design.
 * Collected the problems and improvement suggested by community.
 * Documented what was discussed in Design Document.
 * Discussed solutions to implement the project.
 * Created some mockups draft.
 * Elaborated Design Document.
 * Learned how the FOSS communication environment works.
 * Installed MediaWiki to test and know it better.