From: monteirobrena(a)gmail.com Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2014 17:54:13 -0300 To: wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikitech-l] Preview of the proposal for MediaWiki Homepage Hello everyone, I would like to invite you to take a look the preview [1] of MediaWiki Homepage. Your opinion, contribution and help are very welcome. Thank you. Best regards, [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki/Homepage_redesign/Preview Brena Monteiro +55 27 98109 0123 @monteirobrena <http://twitter.com/monteirobrena> Reflexões Brenianas <http://monteirobrena.wordpress.com> _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Hello everyone, I would like to invite you to take a look the preview [1] of MediaWiki Homepage. Your opinion, contribution and help are very welcome. Thank you. Best regards, [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki/Homepage_redesign/Preview Brena Monteiro +55 27 98109 0123 @monteirobrena <http://twitter.com/monteirobrena> Reflexões Brenianas <http://monteirobrena.wordpress.com> _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

What requirements is this page supposed to meet? It's hard to say if it's "good" without knowing what it's supposed to do. Apologies if I missed a memo. DanB _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Hello everyone, I would like to invite you to take a look the preview [1] of MediaWiki Homepage. Your opinion, contribution and help are very welcome.

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki/Homepage_redesign/Preview

I'm definitely going to have to agree. The "Feature" bits are practically bs: - Publish: Talks about VisualEditor, HTML, and embedded media. A non-default editor practically only available on Wikipedia at the moment, completely ignores WikiText, and "embedded media" doesn't really even fit a description of our file upload system, much less does this describe any real publishing features that are core to MediaWiki like the history tracking of pages. - Discuss: Yeah we have talk pages for each page, but frankly that iconography feels rather deceptive to how that system really works. - Translate: ^_^ Most of this does look good, aside from our abuse of MediaWiki: pages we do have great i18n. However " translation tools to crowdsource multilingual sites" are not core but things like the tools that TranslateWiki uses, and are not going to be easy to find without any links. - Extend: Ok I guess the text here is fine, but for a homepage exclaiming that MediaWiki can be extended I don't see a single link to information on our extensions. - On the Go: Bullshit, Mobile Frontend is an extension not core, and not installed on most wiki, MediaWiki is not "Ready for mobile devices and tablets" out of the box as this deceptively suggests. - Reliable: I'm not sure about the W icon for this. But for a point on being tested and maintained as long as Wikipedia exists, what about how MW is designed to scale up to the level of traffic and reliability needed by a wiki as large as Wikipedia. But frankly I see something even worse on this page. Scanning the entire text of this homepage, aside from "MediaWiki" and "Wikipedia", I do not see one single use of the word "wiki". And worse, not a single piece of text noting that MediaWiki is open source. Forget the way it ignores the existence of the WMF outside of Wikipedia, it's like the fundamental pieces of MediaWiki, a piece of "open-source" "wiki" software, have been completely forgotten and replaced with the kind of homepage you'd see on a for-profit proprietary piece of software. ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/] On 2014-02-25 7:49 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

You would have to go a bit into the js side of things to do that. I'm not sure that's a good idea though. In my experience (on a wiki that used flagged revs), if the newbies see one thing, and regular users see another, what ends up happening is no one notices when the newbie oriented page is broken as the newbies don't know how to report issues (or even recognize something is an issue), which is bad because its the newbies where it is most important to make a good first impression.