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

[Daniel Arnold]

Am Dienstag, 26. September 2006 21:53 schrieb Erik Moeller:
> 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

Well I think it important to keep the interface lean. So I would not advice to 
just add something like that without removing/merging/moving around something 
else.

But let us compare three examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Sidebar

vs.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Sidebar
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Sidebar

I think a flaw in the en.wikipedia sidebar (without looking at any debate 
about that in en.wikipedia) is that huge single group. You hardly can grasp 
them with one view thematically it is just a list of links summed up 
below "navigation". Well does "donations" and "contact" really fall under 
site navigation? I'd say clearly no.

In de.wikipedia and Commons we have created two groups "navigation" (just for 
browsing passively) and "participate" that sums up links that enable/help you 
just to start participating in the one or other way (note also the unusual 
place of the "upload" link) although you could probably argue in detail 
whether certain links would be alternatively fit as well into "navigation" 
(in fact I did copy the idea from de.wikipedia to Commons and reduced a way 
larger sidebar existing in Commons previous to it).

So my recommendation for en.wikipedia only (!) would be making two groups 
maybe similar in scope to the ones in de.wikipedia and Commons and moving 
moving "donations" and "contact" alongside two further links out of your 
above 5 examples into it.

Anyhow (it wasn't mentioned but just in case...) I'd recommend not making 
something like that part of the default MediaWiki interface and letting every 
community decide by themselves how the use that narrow space in the left (it 
is really important to keep the numbers of links and buttons in the interface 
as low as possible).

Arnomane