Talk:Www.wikimedia.org template/2008

Another suggestion for Wikimedia.org

I would like to make a suggestion to modify the website http://www.wikimedia.org.

Currently, it contains only one page, with a logo representation of all of our projects. My suggestion to replace this page with an independent website. This website would become the public face of the Wikimedia Movement.

The Wikimedia Movement, as I understand it, is a

• collection of values shared by individuals (freedom of speech, knowledge for everyone, community sharing etc...)
• a collection of activities (conferences, workshops, wikiacademies etc...)
• a collection of organizations (Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Germany, Wikimedia Taiwan etc...), as well as some free electrons (individuals without chapters) and similar-minded organizations

Which content
This site will summarize what is being done by the Foundation and Chapters globally. It would welcome pages such as "Listing speaking engagements", or "press interviews" done by all organizations. It can also, in the simplest terms possible explain readers what are the roles and responsibilities of each organization.
It can be a place where chapter members and WMF members can built together a description of the movement in its entirety, even if it also means a lot of redirection to the individual websites.
It may be a place where we can list lobbying actions, even if some organizations do not engage in lobbying. It can be a place where we show and share the diversity of actions held to reach the same goal (the photo workshop here, the language conference there).

How
In a lazy way, it can simply be a wiki. I would strongly recommend associating a blog to it afterwards. What about developing a common bookmarking system as well ?

Anthere 16:45, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Comments

Please mention if you support or not the creation of this new wiki. Add comments accordingly

• Approve - FooGuy

• Comment Shouldn't we just make better use of current wikis such as foundationwiki and Meta-Wiki? Cbrown1023 talk 16:51, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
• Thought I agree with Casey; however, perhaps we should think about having a special selection of pages from metawiki (about the community) and WMFwiki (about the Foundation in specific)? James F. (talk) 19:57, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
• yes, but - yes, create a new wiki for the purpose of news and co-ordination of the movement. BUT: which movement? I propose the movement be identified as the Free Culture Movement. Let's embrace our roots and not leave out our biggest supporters and oldest allies. WAS 4.250 00:34, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
• Don't we have wikizine for that? --Yaroslav Blanter 07:34, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

  That's not what wikizine is for. -- sj · translate · +

• Support - I think that a lot of Wikimedia-related content is a bit out of place on Meta as it is currently organized. I think that the site described above can be on the same wiki as Meta content, but www.wikimedia.org may be a better name for it -- with a reorg that moves the truly Meta discussions (essays on the nature of wiki and organization, historical and future discussions) to a Meta: namespace, and organizing a portal and main page focused on the details of the Wikimedia movement. For example:
  • Focus on meetups, event calendars, Wikimedia-wide news.

    Meta: should host meta-essays on the nature of wiki and of organization, and historical and future-looking discussions.

  • Cover summary information about the projects, how they are used, and who to contact for more detail. locally-organized versions of press kits and the like

    The WMFWiki has a hard time keeping such pages up to date, and they don't need to be hidden behind an editing wall.

  -- sj · translate · + 00:51, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Secure

Someone with better coding skills, add a little notice about secure.wikimedia.org when you can. Thunderhead 00:17, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Redesign

I propose removing the Incubator and switching to four icons per row. Also, a bit of page text would make the page more friendly. Thoughts on this design: http://pruebita.com/wmhomepage.html ? Cheers. --MZMcBride 02:38, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I like it. My question is why some of the logos have subtitles like "The Free Encyclopedia", and some do not. —Anonymous Dissident^Talk 05:21, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that seemed kind of strange to me as well. I didn't change any of the current images, though it might be a good idea to find the versions that don't have the subtitles. Another minor thing I noticed was that some of the links use www. and others don't. --MZMcBride 06:22, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

The problem is that this gives preference to English speakers. The other portal was non-language specific. I like how it looks, but that's a secondary priority. :-) Cbrown1023 talk 14:58, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, but so are the logos and the homepages of Meta and the Foundation wiki. ;-) So all things being equal, a little extra English text doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world, but see my comment below about possible language-detection code. --MZMcBride 21:29, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Nice, but possibly we could have something that adjusts the language based on the country your IP is from. (No, I have no idea how to do that but I am pretty sure it is possible) Anonymous101 21:15, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

I think User:Mxn wrote some JavaScript that does some language selection of some type... I'll ping him on his talk page. Or perhaps User:Splarka. Let me poke around. --MZMcBride 21:29, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Okay. It looks like the squid error message (example) uses language detection based on browser settings with English as a fail-safe. That code could easily be adapted to this page. Thoughts? --MZMcBride 21:41, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

This proposal is pretty nice. A couple notes:

• It seems like most people are against using tables for the portals these days. It shouldn't be hard at all to replace the tables with some CSS positioning, similar to what we have on the project portals.
• The images are probably fine, though we could drop the slogan from the Wikipedia and Wikispecies logos. As for Wiktionary, well, we'll probably have to keep the status quo, because that project doesn't have a single logo.
• We can't implement IP-based language detection at Meta; you'd have to ask the developers. But I don't think it's worth it anyhow: IP ranges only sometimes correspond to a language – for instance, you might determine that a certain range belongs to Russia, and thus Russian should be displayed – but even then, Wikimedia chapters like wikimedia.de are more suited for that purpose.
• What we can implement here is a script that chooses a language based on your browser's default language. It's a little controversial, but I haven't seen any big complaints yet, and we're pointing users to the multilingual project portals anyways.

Before changing this page, we need to spread the word about this proposal and allow people some time to offer suggestions etc.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 02:22, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

All right. So where does this announcement need to be made and how long must we wait? :-) Actually, here's my thought. We implement a version that uses English with the JS detection feature built in. If / when future translations become available, we add those. Thoughts? --MZMcBride 02:43, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

The page would look better if the description text ("Wikimedia is owned and operated...") was set in a dark grey, between #333 and #666, and the line-height increased to 150%ish. Pretzels 03:26, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Why has Incubator been removed? Imho, it's more relevant than Wikimania or MediaWiki. SPQRobin ^(inc!) 20:45, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

switched Cbrown1023 talk 21:02, 24 January 2009 (UTC)