Hello, I am Denis Favre, and I am brand new on the Design list.
I am a simple French Wikipedia user, but I have been driven to the
design list by Sylvain Boissel, Network Administrator at Wikimedia
France, because I have made him a suggestion to modify the design of
the Header and template of Wikipedia articles.
As a simple picture is worth a thousand words, before I explain
further, please have now a look to the attached picture I’ve made of
an article implementing my idea.
I took the example from the Wikipedia page "Arab-Israeli conflict”,
and added two lines below the title, lines intended to appear in the
header and template of Wikipedia articles.
These 2 lines highlight the number of editors, editions and watchers
of an article, informations token from the Statistics page.
Here are my reasons : you are not unaware that for a significant part
of the people, the reliability of Wikipedia is suspect ... For me, and
you will easily agree, the reason is, in part, because most people
ignore the reality of the collective writing of Wikipedia.
Yes, the tabs Talk and View history reflects explicitly whether well
the collective writing process which is the project of Wikipedia and
do exist up the page, of course, but they are not prominently
displayed for the general public, which have absolutely no knowledge
of them, as I can check it every time I ask the question in my
entourage, and it is even yet of University level (LOL !)
So, as you can see, the idea is to show very clearly to the readers
the collaborative aspect of the writing of wikipedia articles,
indicating in particular the importance of the number of contributors,
the modifications made and highlighting the discussion existing
between contributors, and leading the audience to surf to the tabs
contents or the Statistics ...
By indicating in the second line the number of supervisors and the
role of the robots, not only vandalism can be discouraged, but this
line highlights that the writing / corrections process is constantly
active and that the article has a good chance of to be up to date, or
at least to have few errors.
Just for you to know, at 57 years old, I had a science writer carrier,
and had a university course of Media sociology.
I hope this suggestion to modify the header and the template of the
articles may be relevant for the design team.
Please let me know what this idea may become...
Regards,
Denis