quiddity wrote:
On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 1:29 AM, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Hello,
The menu on the left hand side lists, in this order
Navigation Main Page Contents Featured content Current events Random article interaction About Wikipedia Community portal Recent changes Contact Wikipedia Donate to Wikipedia Help search search box
Problem: on small screens, the search box is not visible and readers must scroll each time they get to a new page to find it. Whether we are happy with this, or would prefer that people navigate three featured content or indexes or random article, does not change the fact that most poeple actually use search system on internet.
What about changing the search box place ? Perhaps under the logo. Or below the Navigation block. Or fully at the top of the page ?
Ant
We all strongly wanted the search box between the "Navigation" and "Interaction" boxes. It was in almost all the sidebar-redesign drafts, including the final consensus proposal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Village_pump_%28proposals%29/Sid... Rob Church even said he would suspend his development break to help out: [[Wikipedia talk:Village pump (proposals)/Sidebar redesign/Archive 02#If you actually ask...]]
The last mention I can find now, is this: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7493#c45 "Brion Vibber 2008-03-18 23:34:59 UTC ------- I'm going to come out and say we're not going to support customizing the location of the search box within the side bar; in part because it probably shouldn't be in the side bar. Long term we'll probably be moving it to a more consistent location."
So, that's where it currently stands.
unfortunate...
(links above kept to a minimum for simplicity, but there are many related tangents and requests, in the sidebar-redesign archives, and at [[mediawiki talk:sidebar]])
User:Quiddity
(possibly related, http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:GP1 covered "a redesign of the default website interface", does anyone know anything more about this proposal? is it in active development?)
I think it went nowhere. Much to my regret.
Last year at Wikimania, we had both a workshop session where we discussed useability (this proceeding) and the session handled by Andrew, where we discussed again the rather poor useability of the website and poor welcome of newbies in some communities.
If my memory is good, many agreed (for example) that templates are a disaster ;-) But it seems very little has been done in the past year to improve the situation. I think the special page has been improved though (it was very messy, now nicely reorganized). Anythink else ?
Also, the unfriendlyness toward newbies (and cyberstalking issues) have generally increased (at least on the english wikipedia) over the past year.
Ant