[Foundation-l] Design for wikipedia's front page (and corporate)

[Elisabeth Bauer]

Ben Yates schrieb:
> The licencing debate seems irrelevant for the moment.  I'm sure
> designers willing to do pro-bono work would also be willing to licence
> that work under the GFDL (or under standard copyright).  It honestly
> doesn't seem like a very important issue right now considering the
> number of improvements that could potentially be made if we were to
> set the issue aside for now.

It's not as irrelevant as one may think. I was playing with the idea of
a design contest for the german wikipedia among pro's for quite some
time. One of the problems which arose there with our free licenses is
the possibility of modification. If you're a good designer, creating a
good layout for wikipedia - do you really want any design ignorant admin
later fiddling with it and maybe destroying it?

If we want to have a professional designer creating a layout for us, we
need to guarantee them that their work remains intact. My idea was,
though, to use free licenses but have some kind of social contract that
they will be consulted if any changes to the layout have to be done.

> For example: has wikimedia/wikipedia ever been formally tested for
> usability, to see (in hard data) how the interface could be improved?

OpenUsability made two usability tests for the German Wikipedia, you can
find the test results (in english) on:
http://openusability.org/projects/wikipedia/

Lots of issues apply to wikipedia and mediawiki in general.

greetings,
elian