At fawiki, this was brought up multiple times. I think there is interest in incorporating it into the "In The News" section (although we have not all the articles that enwiki has in that section. The idea of a site notice that would appear on all pages was mentioned but some (including myself) are against it. For one thing, site notices can be suppressed, and that can reduce their effectiveness. For another, site notices are meant to be about short-term wikimedia-only topics and using it for general informational purposes is debatable (today we do it for a pandemic, tomorrow for an election or political purpose? or fundraising for earthquake relief? it can quickly bubble up or at least lead to lots of length discussions about valid and invalid use cases; better disallow it outright)Lastly, analysis of data from fawiki's main page (which gets ~50K views a day) shows that taking something to the main page only increases its daily page views by about a few hundred times a day. Those pages are topic of the day (like COVID-19 pages right now) will get most of their viewership through other mechanisms, mainly Google searches. To assume that Wikipedia's "main page" is the starting page for a large group of users, or when they go to find new information, seems to be inaccurate. Spending time on improving those articles and letting search engines guide the readers to those articles seems to be a better use of time.I realize my POV may not be popular. I feel like everyone wants to do "something" right now, and putting stuff on the main page feels like a thing that can be done and fulfill one's self of accomplishment. But honestly, I think we're searching for the key where the light is.Respectfully,HujiOn Tue, Mar 17, 2020 at 6:06 PM Nick Wilson (Quiddity) <nwilson@wikimedia.org> wrote:_______________________________________________Hi all.A number of Wikipedias have either already created, or are discussing, a more visible section on their Main Page to their local information about COVID-19. Some have chosen to highlight a section in their existing "In The News" equivalent or related ideas, some have chosen a sitenotice banner.A few existing examples:Readers often turn to Wikipedia for neutral information in times of stress, and I think it's great that some communities are actively assisting like this. E.g. Enwiki is getting 900,000+ pageviews each day for their main article this week.[1][2]1) Question: Does your language community do something else/unique that is worth sharing?2) Suggestion: If not, you might like to start a discussion with your community about adapting one of these ideas above, yourselves.3) Reminder: Please let people know if there's anything we can do to help, particularly if your community is small and doesn't have anyone available who can easily change things like Main Page design aspects. You can contact other editors for help at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech, or can contact the WMF Web team at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Reading/Web.Best wishes to you all,--QuiddityP.s. There are also some interesting notes being collated atand[1] [This should be all one link. It's just 10 examples out of the many related articles.]<https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=this-year&pages=2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic|Coronavirus_disease_2019|Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome_coronavirus_2|Social_distancing|Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic|COVID-19_testing|Coronavirus|2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_by_country_and_territory|Misinformation_related_to_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic|Xenophobia_and_racism_related_to_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic>[2] See also https://tools.wmflabs.org/langviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=this-week&sort=views&direction=1&view=list&page=2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic for just one example article, across many languages, out of the dozens-to-hundreds of related articles that many wikis already have.
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