Talk:Main Page

Ideas for Main Page organization

The Wikipedia main page incorporates several features:

1. Did You Know?: spotlights new articles or substantial revisions and incentivizes users to do substantial new work rather than just little tweaks here and there
2. Today's Featured Article: showcases articles that have reached the highest quality level, according to the FA criteria developed by folks working on that project
3. In The News: provides short "breaking news" blurbs which link to relevant content
4. On This Day: lists historical facts from this day in history and links to relevant content

We could develop a feature like #1 pretty easily, especially since everything is new right now.

Number 2 is something that I would like for us to have once we have adequate content to support it, but I don't think we are quite there yet.

On Wikipedia, the "In The News" feature is easy to run because almost any news subject is likely to be linkable to multiple pre-existing articles. We might create something like #3 as a way to draw attention to Austrians who are in the news or who have provided commentary on events covered in the news, and our equivalent of the "In The News" feature could be linked from "Current Events" in the nav box on page left.

I think #4 is out for right now, too, although we could eventually note birthdays of famous Austrians and other relevant historical tidbits once we develop a little more content.

The "Community Portal" link on the left could lead to a page much like the one on Wikipedia, with a running "to-do" list of articles that need to be created or substantially revised, links to projects (as they develop), and any notices about community-wide news.

Thoughts? DickClarkMises 09:48, 6 November 2010 (CDT)

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These all seem great to me but of course I have my usual concern about daily updates to the front page now. I find myself suddenly anxious to develop some intellectual eye candy up front along with links to how to write for wikipedia, if only because something tells me that we are the verge of a more public discovery. It would be good to have the curb appeal right up front.

I might suggest that we leave a featured piece up on Austrian economics, right up there with some colored background or something.

--Jatucker 12:26, 6 November 2010 (CDT)

I have the next couple of days off, so I'll try to see what I can do to get Austrian economics up to snuff. By the way, should it be "Austrian economics" or "Austrian school"? Regarding this main page, I don't think "on this day" would be too difficult to set up early. We'd have to gather up relevant birthdays and events (such as the first Mont Pelerin Society meeting, that meeting in 1974 setting the beginning of the Austrian revival, et cetera). It will take some time, though. Maybe a more permanent template, for now, would do the trick—"during this week". We could do a featured picture widget, but instead of featured pictures maybe just rotating images of different Austrian economists and other relative individuals. At first, some of the stuff will prob. have to be "semi-permanent", in the sense that most stuff probably won't be updated every day. JonCatalán^(Talk) 21:01, 7 November 2010 (CST)

Younger, less developed Wikimedia sites (such as Wikisource), have different items on the main page. A featured work of the month, a list of new articles (that anyone can add to), and current collaborations, for example. It may make more sense to pursue some of these less-intensive solutions instead of/in addition to the ones Wikipedia uses.

To start we can at least do "new texts" (probably instead of "Did You Know?") and once we've developed a particular article more fully, make that the month's featured article (maybe for December?). I like the idea of having an "During this week" box that starts off as weekly and eventually can be changed to "On this day". --Forgottenman 08:10, 8 November 2010 (CST)

New design

Work on a new Main Page design is ongoing at Main Page/new. For this initial design I kept many of Wikipedia's design features (but with a different header), and developed similar content. Feel free to make changes or suggestions. --Forgottenman (talk) 14:55, 8 November 2010 (CST)

I implemented this. For whatever reason, the favicon is gone --Jatucker 09:06, 9 November 2010 (CST)

For "on this week", should we link to years and such? I was going to suggest linking with wp:en, but then that wouldn't make sense because you'd direct the user off the site without that page actually being relevant. It makes sense to wikilink to the day, because we could fill in the days with important events and such (that can be used to update "on this week"), but what about the years? JonCatalán^(Talk) 09:53, 9 November 2010 (CST)