This page was nominated for deletion on 2008-04-13. The result of the discussion was keep. |
You know what'd be nice? A tasteful image with "Wikipedia" or "wikipedia" or something, stylized, at the top. Anyway, it's just my 2c. :) Dysprosia 05:57, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I would add more whitespace margins inside the two main boxes, they look a little crowded right now. And maybe move the "Welcome" box a little lower to the center two boxes and make the width the same as them, too. - SheikYerBooty 06:03, Feb 16, 2004 (UTC)
The "Browse Wikipedia by topic" section has got some subpar articles and has got to go. It leaves a bad impression on other people when we link to articles that suck. -- Jia ng
I love it. It is a lot more interesting to read that the current main page, which is nothing more than a list of links. A move to something more dynamic is long overdue. Brings back memories of my beloved temp5. :) It might be worth looking at Talk:Main Page/Layout design and Talk:Main Page/Temp5 for the criticisms made of the last round of main page suggestions to see if those still need to be addressed, and to prevent the same objections being raised again. Angela
I much prefer it to the current one. The focus on the actual articles is beneficial, and it generally looks "slicker" (good amount of white-space, pictures, not too many links). - snoyes 06:24, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Oops, I forgot to say that I liked it over the current page and that it looked find in my bleeding edge build of Firefox. - SheikYerBooty
I like this page. It's really nice. Nico 08:28, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I'm not sure I like it, my first impressions are "who is this aimed at"? It feels a bit like it's aimed at children, is it? And who should it be aimed at? Also, I think the "Welcome! Wikipedia is a multilingual project...." has lost the key point that anyone can contribute, please add that bit back. As it stands I get the impression that some group of multilingual people somewhere are creating the encyclopedia, but that my role is to use it and behave! :) fabiform | talk 09:29, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I like it! However there is too much focus on daily content updates, IMO - a bit different wording would be needed so we don't get mud on our face if we update a section too slowly. For example "this day in history" should be replaced by "Recent anniversaries" or something like it. -- mav 10:53, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I like this layout quite a bit, but I think there should be a slight bit more focus on "permanent content" and a slight bit less focus on "transient content". That is, more featured articles, more "did you know?", and so on, and a bit less recent deaths, anniversaries, and "in the news". Not that we should get rid of the latter, they just shouldn't be 3/4 of the main box. -- Delirium 11:10, Feb 16, 2004 (UTC)
Graphic appeal is much improved. Separating "community issues" from "article navigation issues" is an excellent idea. Highliting specific articles with a summary and picture shows that someone understands the basics of marketing. (You don't develop interest by showing long lists, rather you pick a couple of your best features and display them as attractively as possible.) Puting the intro in a box and reducing its print size is a great idea. Just a couple of suggestions: Can we eliminate the header that says Main Page, Wikipedia the free encyclo? It is completely redundant, it uses valuable space, it introduces white space in a graphically unappealing area, and it robs the page of initial impact (Any advertising layout or copyeditor will tell you that to gain the interest of the viewer you have to grab them with your best copy in the top-left section of the page). Just one last comment, this may just be a reflection of my personal biases but I would like to see links to
Finance and to
Marketing in the applied arts section. These sections of WP have developed substantialy in the past 10 months, so much so that finance is the root page for 275 articles and marketing is the root page for 201 articles. Good work on the new main page.
mydogategodshat 11:23, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
The layout looks nice, and I agree it's a good idea to present more refined articles instead of community content. However, if I am not mistaken, there is nothing to tell the reader that Wikipedia is a place where you can edit any article. There is a link to the "community main page", but IMO that's not enough. Even with the current state of things there are occasional remarks on talk pages, village pump etc. from people who complain about this or that factual mistake because they don't realize that they could remedy it themselves. We should always make it as clear as possible that Wikipedia is free to anybody who would like to contribute. Kosebamse 11:41, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I like it and I don't like it. The new layout is nice, but I am not sure how I feel about the community links being elsewhere. I realize that people can just click on the prominent link on the first paragraph, but that's not enough exposure. Then again, having all those links in the main page clutters things up, and I doubt that many people click on those links anyway. It'd be nice to have some stats on how many anons or new users click on the community links as opposed to the other links. The stat thing could actually be good in determining just what we should put on the main page in general, but I doubt it will happen. I just noticed that the interwiki links are also missing. In my opinion that is a bigger deal, we should figure out a way to put them in the main page somehow. Maybe through flags, but they need to be there as of now since there is no portal and most people show up here. Dori | Talk 14:26, Feb 16, 2004 (UTC)
Wow, thanks for all the feedback! And most of it is positive, too. OK, here's some stuff I intend to change based on that:
If anyone else wants to work on this, please do. I'm not 100% happy with the colors yet - any suggestions in that department? —Eloquence
I like it. Looks nice! Good white space, so not so intimidating. Some of the appeal is the included pictures; we'd always want to be sure to have a couple of article references with pictures like this. My thoughts:
Elf 16:45, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Main Page/Test looks pretty good to me. I would point out that the anniversaries section is much shorter....I kind of like the variety we get on the current main page, and the test version seems to truncate that too much. Also, has anyone considered how this layout would work on occasions when the "in the news", "featured articles", etc. don't have associated pictures? I want to make sure we don't get locked into focusing only on articles with nice little thumbnails -- we've got plenty of excellent imageless articles, and many of them will remain that way for the foreseeable future. The only other major point I notice at present is that the sister project links are gone, but I know there must be an exaplanation for this....still, I'll want to see how they are coordinated with the present test page. Good work! Jwrosenzweig 17:10, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Having the top two boxes the other way around makes a surprising difference, I like it a lot better. :) Still need to get the immediacy of "anyone can edit anything" back, and I agree with the points just above about pictureless articles and snappy paragraphs for the front page. fabiform | talk 18:28, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I dislike it. It feels less information-dense and it also feels as if less of the page fits on (say) a 1024x768 screen. I don't know if those impressions are objectively true, but those are the impressions I get. And I very much dislike moving the community material off-page. I view with great alarm the loss of the front-and-center invitation to "Visit the help page and experiment in the sandbox to learn how you can edit any article right now." Edit any article right now. Edit any article right now. I know the community stuff is only a click away, but it feels to me like a loss of focus and blurring of vision. Just my $0.02. Sorry. Dpbsmith 20:32, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Boss! This is the way to hook more readers! I think the community stuff could still be side-by-side with the top-level topics down below, plus maybe add some kind of big arrow kind of thing pointing down so that people realize the page is longer than one screenful. My one bit of apprehension about content is that the current events stuff might tempt too many people to play amateur journalist instead of encyclopedist, but I suppose that's not a new problem (perhaps a second link to background subject?). It would be cool to have some quasi-current events that are scientific publications/discoveries that don't necessarily make the news-for-a-day cycle. Stan 20:56, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
This page is great! Like Angela said above, it makes me nostalgic for mp/temp5, but this version has an even cleaner layout. I made a couple minor tweaks to the whitespace: added 1em padding inside the boxes, and shaved off a few pixels between them. Hopefully this doesn't mess anything up :) -- Merphant 22:31, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
It is definitely good. But a couple of things come to my vision:
My 2c and congratulations to whoever did it. Pfortuny 18:40, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)
We can maintain the current list of links. Instead of providing a description which could become a difficult to maintain thing, we could add graphics for the sections and keep the descriptions brief if they are kept. -- Hemanshu 15:34, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)
As soon as a description comes in, POV comes in, edit wars come in... etc. not suitable for main page - Hemanshu 07:55, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I don't think we can allow images to be on the main page. Right now, you cannot protect an image. So if a vandal came along, created an account, and uploaded a goatse image with the same name as the one the main page, it would show up despite the protection on the main page. I just tried testing this with
File:Goodtest.PNG (the good image is green, the bad one is red). Despite protecting the image description page, the bad image was uploaded successfully.
Irod 18:24, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC) -- This was me by the way
Dori |
Talk 18:25, Feb 17, 2004 (UTC)
I'd like to reliably reduce the left margin for the list (UL) elements, without changing the global stylesheets. Any ideas how to do that? Could margin-left:-1em in a surrounding DIV break something? —Eloquence 09:53, Feb 18, 2004 (UTC)
On February 16, 1959, '''[[Fidel Castro]]''' became [[Prime Minister]] of [[Cuba]].<br> On February 16, 1918, '''[[Lithuania]]''' declared its [[independence]].<br> On February 16, 1912, '''[[Nikolai of Japan]]''' (a saint of the [[Eastern Orthodox]] church) died.<br>
(It doesn't look quite as bad as the markup suggests, and all that "white" space really has to go!) fabiform | talk 10:24, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)
According to Wikistats we should be hitting the 1/2 million project-wide article mark in about a week and a half. It would be real neat to distribute the press release at the same time. Much work needs to be done fast to make this happen. -- mav 10:00, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)
OK, I've got a first demo of the community main page at Wikipedia:Main Page. Comment away (on the talk page over there), and please help me in filling in the links. —Eloquence 13:23, Feb 18, 2004 (UTC)
I don't like this section and think it should either be removed or moved the community main page. That would give more room for the historical events section (which I think is a much higher priority). What does everybody else think? -- mav 10:48, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
The idea here is to use "did you know" to feature interesting new articles which have not yet undergone peer review. This could also be used for scientific findings which do not make the current events section, for articles imported from public domain sources etc. - generally the kind of stuff that normally doesn't get much attention. —Eloquence
I moved the languages to their own box because they're not "topics". I mirrored the color at the top deliberately. We still need a link or pseudo button ("Choose your language now") at the top that pops the screen directly down to the language list. I'll stick a kludgy one into the top box somewhere but I hope someone comes up with something better because I don't want to distract from "you can edit right now". Elf 16:23, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC) (OK, I stuck one in, but I couldn't quite get the effect I wanted--over to the lower right instead of the lower left. I don't have time to play with it (wish I did). Elf 16:45, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC))
Wow! This is neat, Elf! However, the top most box overlaps the [edit] link. - UtherSRG 16:43, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I replaced the link to Cooking with Cuisine as the recipes and cooking techniques are in the process of moving over to wikibooks, but the various cuisine pages will remain here (or perhaps be both here and there). Cooking can is linked to from Cuisine, so it's only one step removed from the new main page. Gentgeen 17:24, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Aside from the image protection issue, which I think I can resolve fairly easily, are there any other objections to taking this page live? I think we might have something approaching consensus here. —Eloquence 04:30, Feb 21, 2004 (UTC)
The [edit] link problem is fixed now (see above). I agree this should go live, and sooner rather than later to prevent the issue of Main Page/Test2, Main Page/Test3 etc etc appearing and nothing ever happening. :) Angela . 14:34, Feb 21, 2004 (UTC)
I think it looks great. Anyway, well done. It's a lot more dynamic and interesting to newcomers than just a whole bunch of tiny little links - there's something there for them to look at and actually get an idea that yes, this is an encylopedia! I'll have to check out the community page too. (btw, I like the idea of seperating the community links from the rest, because I use them a LOT more than the info links, so the easier it is to get at them the better.) KJ 11:31, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
How does this usually work... do we set up a formal poll and advertise it all over the place, or just go live once people on this talk page are happy? (I'm happy with making this the real main page now, it's looking good!). And, just out of curiosity, will the community main page be protected? fabiform | talk 14:43, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I propose mirroring the way the current main was done - just do it, and then edit war for a bit with Cunctator. :) Martin 16:33, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
How about "Obituaries" instead of "Recent deaths". I find "Recent deaths" kind of jarring. "Obituaries" or something like it would seem more tasteful. In the current main page, this phrase is somewhat buried (no pun intended), but the new layout puts it right there up front. Bevo 17:43, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I find a dedicated section here rather jarring, regardless of the name. That said, I recognize that recent deaths always trigger new articles and activity, so there probably needs to be some recognition of that.
How about "Featured Biographies", located in the same spot, but using a new background color. This would be where more promenent recent deaths go, with the remainder being put in the "In the news" section. I'll grant you that it's a bit euphamistic. However, good new biographies of living people or those that died a long time ago can also go here (e.g. the Mozart article), so it may steer things in a less maudlin direction. It'll also give us two spots to feature good articles -- RobLa 00:18, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I was just playing with the different skins available in my preferences for the first time. Some of the boxes on this main page overlap slightly when I'm using the blue skin (in IE). fabiform | talk 18:02, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I like this one a lot. Where can I state it more formally ? Anthère0
I applaud the efforts of all the individuals who have contributed to the new main page. It is much better than the current one. Perl 22:45, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I reworded the intro, and replaced "learn" with ascertain. Ascertain is a more appropriate word because it means "to discover with certainty, as through examination or experimentation." Perl 23:16, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
We will be hitting the 500,000 milestone by Monday (if not already). I have proposed that the English Wikipedia version of the press release be distributed on Wednesday 25 February. Can we go live with the new page at the same time? -- mav 00:53, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Plain vanilla main page. Optim 02:54, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
discussion moved to plain vanilla talk by Optim
Would it be possible to feature more than one new article in the "did you know" section? For reasons of variety.. i.e., several articles on different subjects to grab as many interests as possible out of the day's crop.
If this isn't feasible due to space constraints, might it be possible to organize a sort of "selected new articles" page (in a complimentary style to the main page, with short summaries and pretty pictures) that would link from the main page? This would be a place to put recently created articles that have been cleaned up, verified if necessary, and that are "ready for the masses". The "raw" list of new pages isn't particularly user-friendly, a point I might as well raise while we're on the topic of reader usability.
Now, I know this would mean a lot of maintenance. I'd be willing to take it on if others feel such a page would be of use to Wikipedia's community and readers. Personally I think it'd be neat to have a user-friendly place to put a spotlight on what's new and give the excellent and hard work of our contributors some exposure. This would not only foster peer review, but it'd reflect positively on Wikipedia as a whole. Much better than leading our readers to a list of stubs. What does everyone else think?
In any event, I like the new format from an aesthetic standpoint. The current main page has brevity on it's side, but as others have said, we're aiming for mass consumption. Nice work. Hadal 03:44, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I have made a proposal at Wikipedia:Main Page fireteams. Perl 16:06, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Is it possible to take out the heading? This was already mentioned and I think it should be removed. It is redundant and causes visual problems. Perl 18:37, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
This is a smashing good page. Deep-six the old one immediately; this one is far superior. I love it! Davidcannon 22:59, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
There are various problems with this combination, which will need to be fixed if you use this version. IE is used by most people on the web. Looks lovely in Mozilla and Opera though! ChrisG 22:45, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I created Template:Holidays and added it to this diff (I self reverted). I think it is a great idea and would tend to balance the length of the two sides of the table. Holidays also make more sense on the news and obit side of the table since they are 'in the now' so to speak. Any objections to me adding this section? I promise to help maintain it. -- mav
If we want to take this page live, we should do it today, to see how strong the inevitable counter reaction will be. I suggest the following procedure:
If majority votes against, old Main Page will be the standard again on Wednesday, when the press release goes live.
Mav, Jamesday, do you agree? —Eloquence 17:28, Feb 23, 2004 (UTC)
That is a very sensible suggestion. Either take it live today or wait until long after interest due to the press release dies down theresa knott 17:32, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Sounds good to me. -- mav 17:43, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Go for it, I'd like to see how it turns out. Dori | Talk 17:45, Feb 23, 2004 (UTC)
We just need to make sure that all the sections are updated. I'll work on the history section. -- mav 17:45, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
History section ready. How are the msgs going to work with our caching system? Will we have to edit the Main Page once a day to refresh the cache and thus update the msgs for anons? -- mav 19:09, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
This all sounds great. :) And it'll get the attention of all the users who haven't heard about it yet so we'll get a better idea of what the whole community thinks. fabiform | talk 19:32, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Going live now? -- Kaihsu 19:35, 2004 Feb 23 (UTC)
We have gone live. Perl 20:03, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Somewhere on some prototype, I saw a section of the Main Page titled "Tip of the Day..." Daily tips might be too much, but i like the idea of including a Tip of the Week. Can we add that to the new Main Page? Kingturtle 22:49, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)