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

[Delphine Ménard]

On 5/19/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sharing is good. Making the logos proprietary is one way of ensuring a
> consistent identity. And you know what's one of the best arguments
> against it? That people will start arguing that now that you've made
> one part of your site proprietary, you should do the same for others.
> That slope is very slippery.

I think this is a bit far fetched. But hey, Verschwörungstheorie ;-)

> I would strongly argue that any redesign that does not affect the
> logos should be done under free content conditions.


Actually, although I did make the suggestion earlier (that Lukasz
reported) that the design should be "non free", I have changed my mind
(sorry Lukasz ;-) )

The problem I see is that the monobook is the default design for every
single Mediawiki in the world. Which means that people have trouble
knowing whether they are on Wikipedia, on a mirror, or some strange
fake site, or on my grand-mother's wiki.

So, the design of a specific wikipedia skin sounds like a good idea.
It can be free and available, but it should not be proposed within the
mediawiki package. Or at least definitely not as default.

This said, reading again the link Elian gave, I believe that before we
go looking for a new skin, a corporate design, a pro's design or an
admin's design (you name it) there are probably many many things to be
done on the usability side. And as I understand it, a new css , as
fantastically beautiful as it may be, does *not* solve all of those
problems. At all. It helps, but it only hides the real issues, which
are probably more technical than visual.

Cheers,

Delphine


-- 
~notafish