Wikipedia talk:Main Page/Temp

See also: Talk:Main Page/Temp (Archive)

I like the French style page - with just a little use of colour it looks a lot more professional. Enchanter

I like it! I would only make the "Selected Articles" and the "Encyclopedia" a different colour. I know, the articles are selected from the encyclopedia, but it would look better that way, IMO. (You could make it a different shade of blue, to show that it ain't green.) But I like it. -- Toby 20:34 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

Yes a different color is needed for the Selected Articles box. How about light brown? --mav 21:42 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

Yes, this is excellent. Thank you, French Wikipedians, for this idea! The Anome 20:37 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

Another thing that the French have done is to redirect the main page to another page, in this case to one called 'Welcome'. Although the French did this to get around having the English 'HomePage' at the top of the screen, it might be worth us thinking about this too. After all, 'Main page' is not a particularly logical title to have in big letters the top of the screen at an encyclopedia site. Maybe we could redirect it to something like "Welcome to Wikipedia" or "Wikipedia - the Free Encyclopedia". Enchanter

Wikipedia - the Free Encyclopedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Welcome to Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

I don't like either. The fist is redundant and the second IMO in not very professional. Other suggestions? --mav

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Heya, looks like someone discovered my little experiment :-). I do like the French look and feel, and hope we can eventually arrive at a pretty standard template for all Wikipedias (yes, I know, they're all unique, but it's really confusing if every site looks a lot different has the information in different places).

Some thoughts:

1. I think the title "Main Page" is OK. It may not be entirely obvious, but it makes more sense once you are used to the wiki concept than something like "Welcome".
2. The 60/40 width difference was only a kludge to ensure that the difference between the two sections - topical, editorial - is more noticable. I think with different colors, this split may no longer be necessary, and the 50/50 design certainy looks nicer.
3. Call me a heretic, but I really think using simple bold for the in-table headlines as the French do looks prettier than the large ==..== headlines.
4. I do not like the gray background welcome text on the French page. I agree that Selected Articles might be worth having in a different color. It would be great if we could come up with some logical reasoning behind our color scheme though.
   1. Right now special and namespaced pages have an ugly yellowish background. The purpose of this color is not intuitively clear. It would be helpful if, whatever color is used, it is also generally used to indicate the same editorial/topical difference mentioned above.
   2. Some Wikipedias, notably French and German, use colored dots for topical distinction. I don't know if that's a good idea, but if we do it, we should develop a standardized code.

Note that the French HTML is currently better, mine is a rather quick hack. It lacks the thin gray borders around the entire table, for example. --Eloquence 00:09 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

1. I dunno know. Perhaps "Welcome" would be the best and most obvious name.
2. No it is not just "kludge". Please read the discussion on this in the archive - I was convinced that it is better to have the split in order to emphasize our content vs our process. Above all else Wikipedia's first job is to be useful. It is also better the way it is from a design perspective since we do not have enough content (nor should we) to fill a wider COMMUNITY column. Also the idea that 50/50 is better since it is symmetrical is erroneous due to the presence of the sidebar.
3. H2 comes after H1 and H3 comes after H2. The way the live Main Page is now is wrong and serves as a bad heading example. H2 is supposed to be a bit big and it looks very nice to me as H2.
   1. You should have seen the light purplish brown that LDC had on the beta last summer - YUK! I don't have any issues with the light yellow. It is IMO the least annoying color that could be used. I don't really view the colors we choose for the Main Page really should have any really deep meaning. It is enough for me that they look nice.
   2. Please no colored dots - they are ugly and add too much visual noise (esp. if we go live with the temp version).

--mav 10:09 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

OK I'm testing the "logical color" idea for the COMMUNITY column. I'm not sure if I'm thrilled though...--mav

Actually I think it is growing on me. --mav

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I was trying to copy and paste the more complete list of international wikipedias in their native scripts from the current main page, but for some unfathomable reason, I can't seem to paste the long list of symbols that display as Arabic, etc words. Can someone else do so? Tokerboy

Done. --mav

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Without width=100% for Selected Articles that box looks ugly at higher resolutions (disembodied is a better word). IE 5 has a rendering bug that messes up tables set to 100% when the sidebar is enabled though. Damn Microsoft. --mav

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While I like this test mainpage, I think the Esperanto mainpage at http://eo.wikipedia.org looks stunning. Perhaps some of their professional-looking visual elements could be integrated into the English mainpage?