[WikiEN-l] Footers at en

[Timwi]

Andrew Cates wrote:
> Who does the footers at en?
> 
> It would seem more sensible for the word "charity" on every page to link 
> to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charitable_organization rather than to a 
> disambiguation page and its a bit rubbishy putting "non-profit charity" 
> as two separate tautologous links and would be better without the 
> non-profit one at all.

Looking at it, I notice many more problems with it than just those. The 
entire footer is a disorganised jumble of:
(a) links to other websites (e.g. wikimediafoundation.org),
(b) links to information _about_ Wikipedia (e.g. Wikipedia:About), and
(c) links to actual _articles_ (such as [[charitable organization]]).

I believe that out of those, the category (c) links are the least 
useful. Not because I think the article is useless or anything, but 
because the information linked to is not specific to Wikipedia or 
Wikimedia, but the user would expect that. Someone added these links 
gratuitously just because they can. It's bad design.

I think a first step of improvement would be to:
(1) remove the three links to actual articles
(2) make the link to [[wikimediafoundation:Deductibility_of_donations]]
     more explicit; don't have it hanging in the middle of text, perhaps
     add it to the third line after "Disclaimers"
(3) also remove the link to wikimediafoundation.org because there's
     already the logo on the left linking to it.

Together, these three suggestions will cause the middle line to have no 
links. This aids readability and structure, especially because the third 
line is /only/ links.

Timwi