[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia sidebar box for wikipedia.org

[Robert Scott Horning]

Erik Moeller wrote:

>As you may know, MediaWiki:Sidebar supports defining little boxes that
>contain navigation links. de.wikipedia.org has used this to customize
>its sidebar, for example.
>
>Should we have a sidebar with the heading "Wikimedia" containing links
>to wikimediafoundation.org for things like:
>- About Wikimedia
>- Projects
>- Volunteer (info about committees, mailing lists, etc.)
>- Jobs (those we chooose to publicly advertise)
>- Chapter information
>
>This is partially a follow-up to my earlier mail re: sitenotice for
>chapters. I think this might be a slightly less aggressive way to
>raise awareness of chapters, sister projects, and the work of the
>Foundation in general.
>
>Thoughts?
>  
>

This is a very interesting idea, and on the surface I don't have any 
strong objection, other than trying to figure out how you are going to 
reasonably implement this sidebar onto each and every project.

I've been involved with modifying the sidebar for en.wikibooks and 
en.wikiversity, so I do have a little experience with both doing the 
actual changes as well as trying to deal with gaining a concensus from a 
larger community over what sorts of things ought to go into 
modifications of this nature.  Generally speaking, as long as the links 
prove to be of substantial value and are maintained, the community 
reaction to these changes has been rather positive and supportive.

I would also strongly recommend that any general "Wikimedia" sidebar 
changes ought to be at the very bottom of any other sidebar items for a 
particular project.

A major concern about doing this is that you had better make sure that 
in this situation, especially since these links will be on practically 
each and every web page served up with Wikimedia servers, that the web 
pages linked in this manner are very nearly "professional" quality and 
have people who are willing to keep them fresh and updated regularly. 
 There is nothing worse than a highly advertised link of this nature 
that goes to what is essentially just a stub or something that is 
horribly out of date.  Both of those have been criticisms of much of 
what is found on http://wikimediafoundation.org

The other major issue I see is dealing with the multi-lingual issues 
that are going to inevitably rear their head for this as well.  **IF** 
there are related pages in the same language as the wikimedia project 
that has this sidebar section being added, it would be reasonable to 
include the link.  Otherwise, I would strongly recommend that you simply 
remove the link altogether and for most languages link only to the 
"About Wikimedia" page.  Do not link to the English language version of 
the page as the "default" setting.  Of course this is just a recommendation.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning