Topic on Talk:MediaWiki/Homepage improvements 2018

Yaron Koren (talkcontribs)

Since you asked for feedback: overall I think the data layout right mostly now makes sense. There are six basic components (which I can paraphrase as Potential users, Users, Admins, Developers, Other contributors and News), and each one seems to have between three and eight links - that seems like a reasonable amount of information and complexity for the main page.

I'm glad you didn't link to User hub, Enterprise hub or Academic hub - those are three (in my opinion) mostly useless pages, in increasing order of uselessness.

I also agree that it makes sense to use the existing pages on the wiki, instead of trying to engineer new pages, in order to keep this project manageable. (Though the existing pages could use a lot of work - for example, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to whether each page is contained in the Help, Manual or main namespaces. But one thing at a time.)

I do have quibbles with some of the choices:

  • Maybe the first section should be considered an "About" section rather than just for potential users? That would allow the FAQ page to be linked from there instead of from the "Administrators" section, where it doesn't really belong.
  • I don't think it makes sense to link to the "Weekly Tech News" from the front page - it's of minimal interest to anyone who would be going to the front page.

Those are the only things that really jump out at me, though.

AKlapper (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Thanks for the feedback. Very appreciated. :) Good points about Tech News (it's linked under Ambassadors on How to contribute already) and making the first section an "About" section.

Regarding the FAQ page, I'd keep it where it is. Though it's horrible in itself. It mixes the very basics ("What's MediaWiki") with very specific technical problems (which might not even be friendly asked) and needs a lot of restructuring in itself. I'm not sure yet how to tackle that though. :-/