On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Paul Houle <paul(a)ontology2.com> wrote: Thank you! I've moved the icons (and made them smaller) to the bottom of the image, after some complaints; force-reload your browser to see the new layout. Also, I had added a bunch of social network "share this" icons, but Geni removed them. Ah well. Cheers, Magnus

The clear icons to the right were better in my opinion without being disturbing or overwhelming. What is the motivation / reason for the change ? Taking in account that the UsabilityInitiative had a similar design; like the one you had for a few days (the larger icons to the right).

Op 6 okt 2010, om 22:24 heeft Magnus Manske het volgende geschreven: > Also, I had added a bunch of social network "share this" icons, but > Geni removed them. Ah well.

On 7 October 2010 01:55, Neil Kandalgaonkar <neilk(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: For what it's worth, Several staff of the people where I'm currently working had noticed the reuse buttons when they were on the right and remarked on them to me as really cool. These were going to be used as an example in a meeting about how their own interface could look but when the buttons moved neither they nor I could find the buttons any more. I only noticed the buttons again when I read this thread. Summary - those buttons placed on the right hand side of the image were noticed by "non-wikipedians" and seen as a good idea. When they moved it was assumed that they were gone, not merely moved. As for the "share" buttons  - precisely why were they removed? Are we anti-social networks (or their logos on our pages), or is it because they were too big or something? FWIW WikiNews has been using these kinds of buttons for a long time in articles.

Main reason being that, although the buttons are highly useful (and I can't imagine any big usercase in which they would be unwanted), so aside from that.... they are also in a very visible area that lots of scripts, tools and applications do or could potentially use to print their buttons and all sorts of triggers aswell. In order to not further complicate that area (eg. "Oh I can't program it here because some of the users of this particular script puts the buttons there also..");

By popular demand here :-) I have re-enabled the larger top/side icons. It is easy to switch back and forth between them. Maybe a user option? Or would that be overkill?

On 10/6/2010 9:55 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: Well, I do think the large buttons on the left looked more like "wikispaces" than "wikipedia" (more commercial) but I thought they looked great. It might be nice to see more of that style in other places. As for social sharing, that's more complicated. I know of a site (that you've probably never heard of) that was lucky enough to get on the list of social media share buttons that came with a popular wordpress plugin, and they got a number of backlinks that was absolutely staggering -- and then they got hacked by some S.E.O. spammers who turned it into their own private playground. The site was ranking well for many search terms and presumably getting quite a bit of traffic and also boosting the rankings of the spammers' sites, but it got zapped when somebody uploaded malware to the site. The site owners were basically absentee landlords and if there were any honest people contributing to the site they didn't do anything about it. Today any idiot can install Pligg and have a Digg clone running in a few hours, and I'm sure there's something out there for making a delicious clone too. So if you make a list, you're in this awful position of picking winners and losers. You could make a case that Facebook is so big that it's sufficient to have a Facebook button -- but there's people out there who really hate Facebook. Now you might say "Facebook", "Twitter", "Digg", "Reddit", "StumbleUpon", "Delicious". Well, some people hate Digg so much that they'll still complain... There probably are thousands or tens of thousands of 'sharing' sites out there, and you can't draw a clear line between ones that are "big enough", the ones that are somebody's web-spam project (it isn't hard to make a flock of electric sheep that can beat the average Digger at the Turing Test), and ones that are just too little to matter... Not without offending somebody, and in a consensus-driven organization, that's a problem. There's also the question of what value sharing buttons bring. For something to get traction in social media, it's got to be not just cool, but ~really~ cool, and what plays depends entirely on the community. For instance, I've got a certain content stream that consistently gets 5-10 votes in reddit and brings in maybe 500-5000 visitors. I submit the same stuff to Digg or Mixx and I might get 5 or 15 visitors. Part of that is that I've got a good account in reddit, but some content just does well in some communities and doesn't in others. For a project I'm working on, I'm seriously thinking about a "Facebook-only" approach. I know that would drive some people nuts, but I own the site lock, stock and barrel and I can do what I want. Not everybody has that freedom. _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l

This is a good thing to watch for, but I don't see how it relates to the idea of having "share" buttons. Wikimedia projects already have towering, monumental PageRank. And our URLs can already be submitted to social media, and there are obvious opportunities for SEO hacks already. Luckily we have a pretty vigilant community. The "share" button makes it easier for ordinary users to share things via social media. I don't see how it enables SEO spammers any more than we already do. But I'm not super familiar with that world, perhaps you can explain it further?

If we want to avoid people complaining, we just have to do nothing. And of course, until the social media sites standardize on some API, there's always the question of which sites to include in a "share" widget, and whether this means some form of approbation. Personally, I don't agree that putting a "Digg" button on the site means that we approve of Digg or whatever, it's just a convenience.

There probably are thousands or tens of thousands of 'sharing' sites out there,  and you can't draw a clear line between ones that are "big enough",  the ones that are somebody's web-spam project (it isn't hard to make a flock of electric sheep that can beat the average Digger at the Turing Test),  and ones that are just too little to matter...  Not without offending somebody,  and in a consensus-driven organization, that's a problem.

"Booksellers" is obviously a bigger pool than social networking sites or microblogging services or what have you, but I can certainly see Paul's point here that it's opening us up to a lot of potential hassle, and a lot of fuss from people who have very strong incentives to get their service listed.