At 2010-10-10 10:02, Max Semenik wrote:
On 10.10.2010, 6:36 Andrew wrote:
Do we seriously need such an obnoxious message here? I realise that we might have had a problem in the past with people clicking on the MediaWiki logo in the corner when installing their wikis, but perhaps we could solve this problem by delinking it, instead of an English Wikipedia style giant stop sign at the top of the page. It really hurts my eyes.
I must admit, the stop hand pic was added by me. The problem here is not that we need to delete crap - making several clicks is easy. However, people often spend significant amounts time writing a page intended for Wikipedia or their internal wiki only to see it deleted in a few minutes. That's not very nice either. And I must admit that the impact of my changes to the warning text was insignificant.
I think many people simply don't know how Internet works. When they run some standard application they stay in that application in the same window. And here you still are in the same window and if icons looks similar... I work for a company that makes applications for libraries. We made a new skin for readers catalogue and provide a default logo of our company. Suddenly people started calling and asking if they can borrow book about "..." :-). Yes people adapt over time, but new ones must adapt this and new ones are born everyday.
Total delinking would be strange, as this seems a stndard practice among other free web apps. And you can't seriously suggest that we remove mw.org links from the post-install message, too. There could be several other options:
- Make mw.org look less alike to default installs. Changing skin to,
say, Modern would be good, but our site must remain a showcase for our product, so we must stick to default look.
- Change skins/common/images/wiki.png to not contain the MW logo.
This will have only moderate effect, though.
Why not change the skin and create demo.wikimedia.org? That's what others do as usually the main page is not the showcase itself.
- Create some kind of advanced protection, for example site JS that
makes anons click on "continue" before seeing edit page. Not really an option in this particular way, but maybe something in this line could work. An extreme way to prevent many unwanted edits would be to restrict content page creation by anons, but I don't think we need it ATM.
That would be fairly easy to do with a simple confirm dialog run onsubmit (only added for anons). Or even lock edits add info (and a link) to either login or go to the demo site.
Regards, Nux.