Talk:Main Page/Archive 9

Main Page redesign proposal

Inspired by others, I put together a Main Page redesign proposal. It's not totally complete, but we could templatize what's there and put it live, if there is community approval. I invite comments for at least a 4-day period. -- IlyaHaykinson 2 July 2005 02:08 (UTC)

See my (and other's) criticisms of Amgine's proposal above - the same apply here. But in particular, note how the same story is listed over and over again. (I must also say that the writing is very small and quite hard to read.)

Our current main page is very good. It is not broken, it does not need fixing! Dan100 (Talk) 2 July 2005 18:30 (UTC)

Great effort, both of you, but one thing I'd like to point out is that Illya's page displays much better on lower-resolution monitors than our current version, which right now is a big issue. NGerda July 2, 2005 18:36 (UTC)

Is it? Statcounter on the RSS feed blog shows only 8% visiting with 800x600; everyone else is using better. It renders perfectly on my 1024x768 display. Dan100 (Talk) 2 July 2005 18:39 (UTC)

That's for the RSS feed, I'm talking about people who come to Wikinews for the first time, and I'm sure it's much higher. NGerda July 2, 2005 18:58 (UTC)

I think my sandbox differs from Amgine's sandbox on a few important points. First, there is less duplication and less articles: each topic or region only has two stories listed, and users are encouraged to click through to the section (i.e. Africa or Politics and conflicts) instead. As for small writing, I was modeling partially after BBC News's homepage which has small fonts as well but has likely been through more usability testing than we have done. -- IlyaHaykinson 2 July 2005 18:48 (UTC)

No, look how Live 8 is repeated four times. On the other hand, note how the top education story is from over a fortnight - old news, makes the page look stale.

That design also hides a lot of recent news - if there's three Disasters and accidents stories in a day, for example, the earliest one is lost even though it's still very current!

BTW on my monitor BBC news's type is considerably larger - maybe they're detecting screen resolution? Dan100 (Talk) 2 July 2005 18:55 (UTC)

Let's turn this around: what do you feel is wrong with our current Main Page? Dan100 (Talk) 2 July 2005 18:56 (UTC)

I compared the BBC and Wikinews fonts. The font is the same height — but BBC's font has greater letter spacing. We could tweak this by selecting another font for our pages.

I also determined why the "Live 8" story was appearing four times — first, because the listing for Environment was actually listing things for Politics and conflicts because of bad DPL code, and second, because the "Live 8" story really doesn't belong in Category:Politics and conflicts.

But to address your question of what's wrong with the current Main Page: I think it doesn't show the breadth of Wikinews well enough. It encourages daily article count growth without regard to breadth of topics (and we should be trying to cover all sorts of topics. It ensures that causal users really only ever read the homepage and maybe an article off the homepage, instead of clicking through to one of the topic or category pages and seeing the depth of news aritcles we've written over time and recently.

Honestly, I look at any other news site and I don't see a "list of last 15 stories we've written, organized by day" types of homepages. Instead, I see some leads followed by topical breakdown. If we want to grow up to become a news site of the stature of the mainstream media, we need to adopt that kind of design as well. -- IlyaHaykinson 2 July 2005 19:21 (UTC)

Re: text size - yes, some of the BBC's text is the same size, on closer inspection. But most of it is the same size as our own standard font (at least in Opera at 1024x768).

But how is "they do it differently" an argument for change? I've often thought how poor only putting a handful of stories on their main pages isn't very good.

Our by-day listing isn't dis-similar to RSS - and everyone knows how popular that is.

Your design hides a huge number of articles. Say two articles are written in one day for North America - not unlikely - on your page, only one is listed. On the other hand, if they do click-through the topic/region header, they'll find themselves on one of sub-pages - which, let's face it, are often very stale. Do we want that? Dan100 (Talk) 2 July 2005 19:41 (UTC)

BTW what's your response to the issue of stale news on the page? Top education story a fortnight old, top Environment story a week old. Probably the worst is Central America - six weeks old! Dan100 (Talk) 2 July 2005 19:44 (UTC)

Actually, just for kicks I dropped your DPL into our current main page,made the text legible for moi and got: User:Dan100/sandbox. Doesn't look too bad. But I'd still object to it's use on the grounds I've raised. Dan100 (Talk) 2 July 2005 19:49 (UTC)

I think that, when we're doing 20+ articles a day every day, this is the kind of design we'll need to adopt. But until then, we're just not producing the articles we need. The BBC, of course, produces many new articles in every section every day. Right now, we go weeks betwen articles in some! That just doesn't look good. Dan100 (Talk) 2 July 2005 19:57 (UTC)

Seconded. Let's get a stable article count first and satisfy the other "out of Beta" requirements. Wikinews is not just for the outside world. Especially now, in the early stage of the project, it's important that we are constantly reminded of the progress of the site. I would be more supportive of Ilya's proposal if it made use of dates in the categories, and perhaps an extension to show the number of articles written on a given day. As is, we risk losing track of our progress and falling into stagnation.--Eloquence 3 July 2005 01:00 (UTC)

Feedburner?

I was delighted to find out that Wikinews now uses RSS. However, i am a bit puzzeled by the fact that the RSS icon point to a page wich encourages people to download the Feedburner software. This really seems like some kind of marketing trick on Feedburners behalf and should be adressed. --Blx 5 July 2005 03:16 (UTC)

It says no such thing, not least as there's no such thing as 'Feedburner software'. Just add the URL to your aggregator. Dan100 (Talk) 5 July 2005 14:00 (UTC)

Incorrect grammar on main page

"Four terrorist bombs have exploded in London. More than 30 people are dead, and hundreds injured." should read "Four terrorist bombs have exploded in London. More than 30 people are dead, and hundreds are injured." Muhgcee 8 July 2005 06:51 (UTC)

Anyone can edit the template - I put a link to it on your talk page. -- Davodd | Talk 8 July 2005 06:58 (UTC)

third lead

Suggest putting another story up now as the one about telecommunications is out of date. ClareWhite 8 July 2005 12:41 (UTC)

I was going to but Uncle G beat me to it. → CGorman (Talk) 8 July 2005 12:49 (UTC)

"threathens"

Article titled "Rome may be next: Group threathens". Maybe that should be "threatens"?

If you register a username, you can change the names of articles by clicking "rename" at the top of the page. Cheers! -- NGerda July 8, 2005 21:07 (UTC)

design change

the right side is now too wide. i think the bottom should go back on the bottom. also, how did someone manage to get the developing stories to show up in all caps? Kevin Baas^talk 9 July 2005 14:07 (UTC)

This was all caused by two missing characters. UncleG fixed it.--Eloquence 13:25, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Refresh Link

The refresh link on the main page (action=purge) seems to step back a few days. Is anyone else getting this? -GChriss

This is a defective MediaWiki bug, I've experienced this, too when I wasn't logged in. -- NGerda 17:05, July 10, 2005 (UTC)