Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Usability/Main Page

Proposed new main page · Current main page · Vote and discuss
The final election ran from 1 March 2006, 00:01 (UTC) until 18 March 2006, 23:59 (UTC). Voting is now ended.
The results are 687 (support) /213 (oppose) /43 (neutral)

The old Main Page design is still available and updated at this page:

Main Page alternative (Classic 2006)

About the redesign

Draft archives
Draft 5 Archive Draft 6 Archive
Tally (poll) archive for Draft 1 through 4 Draft 1&2 Talk Archive Draft 3 Talk Archive Draft 4 Talk Archive Draft 5 Talk Archive Draft 6 Talk Archive Post Draft 6 Talk Archive Open editing session Talk Archive Bug fixing session archive Final poll and discussion archive

The proposed main page design:

• Improves the prominence of the portal links.
• Clearly divides the header's article navigation links and project-related links.
• Includes both the Picture of the day and Did you know... on the main page, seven days a week.
• Adds a section containing descriptions of Wikipedia's important non-article areas.
• Swaps the positions of "Did you know..." and "Selected anniversaries" (renamed "On this day..."), thereby establishing a left-hand column that highlights our most polished articles and our newest articles (which hopefully will receive similar treatment), along with a right-hand column that highlights current news stories and news stories from years past.
• Swaps the positions of the links to our sister projects and the links to other languages' Wikipedias, thereby eliminating the need to use extra-small text for the latter.
• Aims to improve the page's aesthetic appearance.

Issues considered in the redesign process

• Second search box: With a vote of "no consensus" on including a second search box in the design, we have omitted it. We are considering options for tweaking the MonoBook skin to make the left search box more prominent and noticeable.
• Article count in header: The proposed design provides no elegant means of including the article count in the main page header. It is, however, included in the "Wikipedia languages" section. The one million article milestone will have come and gone by the time voting on the main page redesign concludes. Beyond that milestone, many in the Wikipedia community, including Jimmy Wales, have discussed putting more emphasis on quality than quantity of articles. Displacing the article count from the header is consistent with this.

Future issues

Subsequent issues to be considered after this vote include:

• Drive to improve quality of the portals and topic organization.
• Improve visibility of the left-navigation search box in the default MonoBook skin. Perhaps, an orange-colored border (as used on the active tabs at the top)?

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Thank you for your participation!

This Main Page Redesign Project is over! Thank you everyone for your hard work and support. --Go for it! 17:46, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Congrats, everyone—barnstars all around!

This goes by the honor system: if you worked hard, take it! If not, there's always something else to do...--HereToHelp 01:05, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

The Tireless Contributor Barnstar For everyone who worked so hard on the Main Page redesign, we all deserve a barnstar! HereToHelp 01:05, 19 March 2006 (UTC) Seconded :-) +sj + 10:00, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

• I second the congratulations to everyone. Apologies that I wasn't here, during the weekend, to help out with code debugging. My hard drive failed, so I've been busy installing a new one. On to working on the portals for me, and revising the Wikipedia:Searching page. The other outstanding issue is possibly highlighting the left search box. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 14:56, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Aftermath

Does anything still need sorting out in the aftermath of all this? One thing I thought of was whether the Alexa page rank website would show any differences? I found an archived discussion from last year here that (some way down the page) talks about how removing category links (which became the portal links now on the Main Page) possibly affected the Alexa rankings. Carcharoth 16:37, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

I copied the current Main Page code to here (Wikipedia:WikiProject_Usability/Main_Page) (instead of the redirect to protected-draft-subpage) so that we can continue to test out options here. --Quiddity 23:18, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Do we want to do something about the 'tomorrow' link requested for 'On this day' on the Main talk page? Basically, since the timing of the 'page date' change is at odds with local time for most of the world some users would like to be able to get materials for the 'correct' date with a single click (automatic adjustment would pose several technical problems).

To do so we could replace the current 'On this day' box footer of: Recent days: March 23 – March 22 – March 21

with something like: Prior day - Today's complete list - Next day

Note that these links use generic 'day-1' and 'day+1' templates rather than hard-coded dates... which could then be placed on the 'Selected anniversaries' page for every day - allowing a user to 'browse' backwards or forwards through the 'On this day' materials. We could also add a calendar, inside 'noinclude' tags to prevent display on the Main page, to all the 'Selected anniversaries' pages to allow users to jump to a specific date. The same could be done to enhance the current article and picture of the day 'archives' - possibly not including links to future material if we don't want that displayed prior to the 'day' it is assigned to. It is even possible to show the entire Main Page for tomorrow or yesterday. --CBDunkerson 01:40, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. Should probably be raised on each of the subsection's pages. and i love the "Tomorrow's newspaper" insinuations ;) --Quiddity

I'm not sure what you mean by the "...add a calendar..." idea though. A hide/show (javascript) section that reveals 365 links? --Quiddity 02:12, 24 March 2006 (UTC)