[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation Website

[Delphine Ménard]

On 8/24/06, effe iets anders <effeietsanders at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think that the most important thing now is to
> *Define the goals of the Website
> *Find out what are the consequeses for those goals

Thanks jd and effeitsanders for trying to take care of this stuff.
My take is following:

The Foundation website is the official window of the organisation. As
such, it should:
1) present the Foundation, what it does, who is part of it, efficiently
This should be a pretty much static thing, the goals of the Foundation
and what it is do not change everyday.
2) Allow for official annoucements to be made (reports, press releases etc.)
This is the dynamic part of the site, and should auto-archive when
news are too old
3) Allow for a good interface for donations
This is not *so* dynamic, but should be updated with every fundraising.

I *do not* believe, unfortunately, that the dynamic part should exist
in all languages automatically, because unfortunately, the translation
does not occur in real time. As we can see today, some of the dynamic
pages are frightfully out of date and if someone looks at the Dutch
page [1], it's totally different from the English one,. The Italian
version [2] might be one solution, as it integrates the English news.

If we're going to provide the static version in xxx languages, we need
to make sure that changes are repercuted in all other versions in due
time, and not three years later. So we might want to cap the number of
languages we provide the translation in to those languages that are
actually being updated.

All in all, I would keep the number of dynamic parts as small as
possible, so as to make sure that the site does not look out of date
every other month.

And someone should be responsible in the long run for making sure that
the site stays updated. As in, *really* responsible.

Delphine

[1]http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Hoofdpagina
[2]http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Pagina_Principale
-- 
~notafish