Thanks for taking down the thoughts, Daniel; the translation and mobile friendliness got me amused too.
On Wed, 26 Feb 2014, at 9:18, Daniel Friesen wrote:
I'm definitely going to have to agree.
The "Feature" bits are practically bs:
- Publish: Talks about VisualEditor, HTML, and embedded media. A
non-default editor practically only available on Wikipedia at the moment, completely ignores WikiText, and "embedded media" doesn't really even fit a description of our file upload system, much less does this describe any real publishing features that are core to MediaWiki like the history tracking of pages.
- Discuss: Yeah we have talk pages for each page, but frankly that
iconography feels rather deceptive to how that system really works.
- Translate: ^_^ Most of this does look good, aside from our abuse of
MediaWiki: pages we do have great i18n. However " translation tools to crowdsource multilingual sites" are not core but things like the tools that TranslateWiki uses, and are not going to be easy to find without any links.
- Extend: Ok I guess the text here is fine, but for a homepage
exclaiming that MediaWiki can be extended I don't see a single link to information on our extensions.
- On the Go: Bullshit, Mobile Frontend is an extension not core, and not
installed on most wiki, MediaWiki is not "Ready for mobile devices and tablets" out of the box as this deceptively suggests.
- Reliable: I'm not sure about the W icon for this. But for a point on
being tested and maintained as long as Wikipedia exists, what about how MW is designed to scale up to the level of traffic and reliability needed by a wiki as large as Wikipedia.
But frankly I see something even worse on this page. Scanning the entire text of this homepage, aside from "MediaWiki" and "Wikipedia", I do not see one single use of the word "wiki". And worse, not a single piece of text noting that MediaWiki is open source.
Forget the way it ignores the existence of the WMF outside of Wikipedia, it's like the fundamental pieces of MediaWiki, a piece of "open-source" "wiki" software, have been completely forgotten and replaced with the kind of homepage you'd see on a for-profit proprietary piece of software.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]
On 2014-02-25 7:49 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) wrote:
The huge image at the top, pushing all the real content "below the fold", seems pretty awful to me. I also don't much care for the weird, vague "feature" bits at the bottom that don't even link to anything useful and distract from the links to actual useful content just below them, or the fact that in the "News" section useful stuff like security releases has been replaced with irrelevancies (and given such little space that it wraps the headlines after every word or two), or the lack of mention as to what the current version number is near the "Get MediaWiki" button.
It seems to me that you probably concentrated too much on the "to better promote MediaWiki as a product" part and not the "and as a free software project" part.
On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 3:54 PM, Brena Monteiro monteirobrena@gmail.com wrote:
Hello everyone,
I would like to invite you to take a look the preview [1] of MediaWiki Homepage. Your opinion, contribution and help are very welcome.
Thank you.
Best regards,
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki/Homepage_redesign/Preview
Brena Monteiro +55 27 98109 0123 @monteirobrena http://twitter.com/monteirobrena Reflexões Brenianas http://monteirobrena.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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