all up it consumed about 7 months of discussion see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:2008_main_page_redesign_proposal/Archive_1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:2008_main_page_redesign_proposal/Archive_2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:2008_main_page_redesign_proposal/Archive_3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:2008_main_page_redesign_proposal/Archive_4

the proposal first gained sufficient momentum to be formalised in July 2008 by December in had slowed down many people had lost interest or just drifted away over the holidays, in febraury the discussion just stopped the result was no change to the main page. Every week editors would drift through questions would be asked designs would be propogated and agreement would appear to ensue, then the designs would be reduced to a couple of choices a poll would commence then it would be follow by a poll as to how long the poll should run.after a couple of designs were chosen more question(mostly repeats) would be asks and those designs would be thrown away the process would be repeated.

There was straw polls, the was an RFC, there was a straw poll to have an RFC. What all the discussion came down was that people had their own wants and barrows to push, there was no clear objective, there was no leadership in the process, there much discussion about goals in fact they were changing so fast at one stage there was two ongoing discussion about goals. Basically if you want to stop a process reaching a result via consensus increase the number of people involve, the leason here is
to quote user:Auburnpilot After seven months of back-and-forth nonsense, the only proposed changes are so insignificant that bringing them to the attention of the wider community would be utterly pointless. It's a shame so many editors have already wasted their time on this thing, but keeping it going will not change the fact that it was a wasted effort. It was a nice idea in theory, but the execution killed it.

Compar to that what has occured in the last week
except for those reading this list these changes would probably go unnoticed, because most people arent interested in the main page until a big deal is made of it. If you need a proccess to emulate for changing the main look at how the vector skin was done and how successful it introduction has been. There was no big voting process for the upload form changes, as such no drama.
 



On 19 May 2010 00:12, Guillaume Paumier <gpaumier@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi,

Le lundi 17 mai 2010 18:51:54, Gnangarra a écrit :
>
> oh please not another main page contest, havent we been able to learn from
> the experience on en.wikipedia about main page redesigns

Not everyone is from en.wikipedia; but I'm sure you'll be happy to share your
experience.

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