User talk:ShakataGaNai/Main Page (6 Lead)

Main page designing
Ok...I have been doing some reading. More so occasionally the foundation-l threads. With the recent newspaper industry and some major news sites going belly up or charging fees, we need to start attracting more people to WN. Google news is a big help...but aside from that, when people come here the first thing they see is the main page. As it stands, everything is literally forced into this page, even the leads. We need a 100% total overhaul. It needs recreated...from absolute scratch. We have things cluttered and sized because we hate whitespace. But yes I like the plot we have going, it just does not work. I refuse to even touch it because its just too much to understand. Examples of DO NOTs, that we do: We link obsessively to Wikipedia and it has been mentioned that all we are is a promoter to Wikipedia by using too many links to it, in itself just instantly dragging the readers or contributors away from WN at first chance. That should stop. What I mean is we even link to 'free' on the header. We have too many links to too many things going to too many places. 2) Our leads IMO are the most important thing on the page. Forget everything else for the time being and work out a simple, yet nice/pretty/cute/whatever arrangement. It does not need to be rocket science. I think once we work with the leads, and how many in what order and size....Let go from there and work to what is the most important after that. We don't need to see how much we can stuff onto it. I mean I could seriously go on and on on whats wrong with it and I praise Shaka's work to fix what we could with it. But I am sure he will agree with me that it's just a complete mess. It has not once been overhauled, completely from scratch, since WN's creation. its time IMO. DragonFire1024 (Talk to the Dragon) 03:28, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I generally agree, and wish ShakataGaNai good luck. However I disagree with not linking to wikipedia (although linking to free in the header is overkill). Most people I've talked to have said that the links to wikipedia with in articles are one of the major selling points of wikinews. Bawolff ☺☻ 04:33, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Same on the articles. Linking to wp on the articles is good, it's _why_ we are wiki.  Other uses, like on the front page... already eradicated. -- Shakata Ga Nai  ^_^ 05:26, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I am not saying do away with WP links. We just simply use too many at once. Not every single detail, fact or big word needs to be linked to WP. We are not WP and the more we link to them, the more a user is taken out of WN before they even know what we are. We just need to cut back and localize what we can whenever possible. DragonFire1024 (Talk to the Dragon) 11:33, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Links to Wikipedia should not appear anywhere above the crease on the main page. Links to the WMF are okay as the project's parent. It is already written into policy that WP links should never be written into lead text, and within articles there is a push to promote United States as opposed to United States. The latter is in the style guide, and really a discussion for elsewhere such as WN:WC; It may be that we need to create more main namespace redirects to portals to minimise people leaving en.wn. Alternatively, we could look to working with Wikipedia to get semi-dynamic linkbacks. By that I mean, if I'm reading an article with a link to Wikipedia then the Wikipedia page is smart enough to know you've come from a sister project, that you might not have finished reading there, and at the end of the intro/summary on the WP page it has a "Return to Wikinews article XXX" link. Same for wiktionary which is perhaps under-utilised. --Brian McNeil / talk 13:57, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Open to new Idea's
I'm open to new idea's for even bigger stylistic changes. If you've got a site for an example, or can create another page - do so. Remember we still have to fit into the standard wiki formatting on the left and top - so we are limited. Right now I'm going for the plan of ripping almost everything off the main page. Our main page is going to reflect what wikinews is all about - the news we write. For example: I don't give a shit about oil prices or stock quotes, there are better sites for that stuff. -- Shakata Ga Nai ^_^ 04:29, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * On the other hand, we could always change the standard wiki formating, so if someone has some ultra cool radical idea, don't let that stop you from suggesting it. Bawolff ☺☻ 04:37, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * ok random idea #1 (this just popped into my head based on something somebody said on foundation-l, I'm not sure if its a good idea or not). People want to read news, not headlines, thus we ditch the big list of articles, and instead exclusively have leads (say 6 or something). These leads would automatically (as in different on each page load) rotate between the last twenty or so published articles (In this scheme, every single article we publish would be a lead at some point). Thoughts? Bawolff ☺☻ 05:11, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Hey. If you have _any_ suggestion on how to get automatically updating leads - I'm all ears. I'd _love_ to do that.  I suspect it would involve having a hidden template at the top of the articles with info like title, type (breaking, exclusive, etc) and image.  Not a problem to do templates like that - just have no idea how to pull that info & say the first 250-500 char of text from the article.  Then push that into templates that automagically update via something like DPL. -- Shakata Ga Nai  ^_^ 05:25, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Hmm well i think the only logical and easy way to do that would be VIA a bot. I know nothing of DPL's or what not so I don't know how to go about that route. DragonFire1024 (Talk to the Dragon) 11:37, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Has anyone checked the front page of the Norwegian Wikinews? I really like how they've set things up, and it allows for more leads, but smaller, and looks very nice. Mike Halterman (talk) 05:22, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Hmm http://nl.wikinews.org/wiki/Hoofdpagina looks fairly similar to our date list - unless I'm missing somethig. -- Shakata Ga Nai  ^_^ 05:25, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * nl is Dutch. :) Norwegian is no. Mike Halterman (talk) 06:33, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Good Call... http://no.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinytt:Forside does look better. Well, at least I get the idea.  I think they've got too much shit going on - 5 columns wide is a bit tight even on my 1680x1050 screen.  So I get what they are doing with their leads.  I've actually taken apart their system already and I must say they've got an ingenious use of templates and substringing...  Something that I think we could possibly use.  Granted we'd actually put it into templates and make it more friendly.  I'll fiddle with it more over the next few days and get back to you. -- Shakata Ga Nai  ^_^ 07:37, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah too many columns and looks to bunched and forced onto the page. I think the biggest problem we face is just clutter. Yes the main page is the most important part of WN next to articles, but like I mentioned above with WP links, we should try and avoid putting as much info as possible on it. We have plenty of sub pages that can be linked to in a more user friendly way. DragonFire1024 (Talk to the Dragon) 11:36, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

The Norwegian layout is interesting, but there would be a lot of leads to update in the lower section. I suspect if you just say, 'latest story goes top' then there's potential to automate the process. Alternatively, we might be able to get someone to cook up something on the toolserver to maintain the leads and review what possible updates could be made from specific categories.

From what was said on foundation-l, and comments here, key issues are stale leads and a too-easy-to-identify situation where you can count the total articles per day and bemoan the lack of output. The Norwegian layout makes this less obvious, but we're still stuck with the low contributor base being an issue.

One suggestion that crops up from time to time is a fixed width format for the site. I'd guess a big argument in favour of this is being more in control of layout. What - apart from not rendering on mobile phone browsers - are the big drawbacks? --Brian McNeil / talk 14:09, 13 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I've done a bit of tinkering in one of my sandboxes, and look what I came up with: User:Tempodivalse/mainpage. It's compact, yet still containing all relevant information. Plus, there's no whitespace to worry about, and the hated scroll bar that currently appears on the front page is no more. Thoughts? Tempodivalse [talk]  18:13, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I'd actually be a fan of making six leads, breaking it up like the Norwegian page, but with the way you've laid it out, three and then three. Like one section can be "world," one can be "United States," one can be "in the commonwealth," one can be "culture," one can be "sports," and one can be "science and technology." Mike Halterman (talk) 19:39, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I like that micro list. -- Shakata Ga Nai ^_^ 00:09, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Of course it doens't work in IE6-8. -- Shakata Ga Nai ^_^ 00:26, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * At one point i was experimenting with making dpl columns for something else - its a bit hacky, but mostly works [and i think is cross browser] - User:Bawolff/sandbox/horizInfobox might be adaptable to your design. (be warned uses special css that doesn't work outside of the linked page). Bawolff ☺☻ 02:19, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

I think we should abandon the format and go for "all lead". Granted I think this is going to something that requires a "technology" solution. I also feel very strongly that we need to get rid of, or get out of the way, everything on the main page that isn't news. Wikipedia has its draw because you go there and search for what you want, the main page is kinda a moot point. Commons is much the same. Wikinews... well we need to PRESENT the news since _generally_ people don't search for the news. -- Shakata Ga Nai ^_^ 00:09, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Roughly User:ShakataGaNai/Main Page 2. Ignoring the fact that the same image and text are used for every item.  The idea would be that DPL would provide the list article title to something else which would then be able to pull the summary and image from the article itself. So it would update entirely automatically. -- Shakata Ga Nai  ^_^ 00:31, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Hm. Sounds like a great idea, but I'm not sure how that's going to work, if you're suggesting the updating is automated. How will we tell the DPL what image, and, perhaps more problematically, how much text to take from the article? As far as I know there is no wiki formatting that sophisticated. Tempodivalse [talk]  01:58, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Here's one way of doing it that i see. Each article has a lead subpage. (we could also do noinclude tricks like the no wikinews does, however than we can't transclude articles [does that really matter though, how often do we transclude articles], OTOH using subpages makes special:random not work as well) Using magical templates, I think it would be possible so that we could have one template that just contains a list of articles we want on the main page, and then magical templates call everything else. (of course thats easier said than done, but i think its possible) Bawolff ☺☻ 02:19, 14 May 2009 (UTC).
 * The way I'm thinking goes like this: We put in a new version of the "dateline" template.  Except it contains the dateline and almost everything else we'd need for the "lead", including image, special types (like breaking), etc.  Most of this "extended" information would be hidden on the article itself. This would be pulled by magic software (something would have to be written) along with the first (say) 250 characters of standard text that falls directly after that template.  So it would ignore images & other template plus it would "unlink" the text (so discard any wikilinks).  So all we'd need to do is get DPL to the link name it magic software, and it would return all the info we needed for use as lead.  I'm fairly sure this wouldn't be terribly difficult to write - just would need to get someone to write it and get installed for WN to use. -- Shakata Ga Nai  ^_^ 03:24, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I wonder if thats possible to do with DPLv2 (or something like semantic mediawiki). From my understanding, dpl2 can pull the first paragraph from an article, and display it nicely. (however from my understanding, dpl2 is not likely to be installed here). Bawolff ☺☻ 02:40, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I've been experimenting with this idea a little bit. Here's what i got so far - User:Bawolff/sandbox/Lead-only Main Page (try refreshing, its different on every page load!). Basically the last twenty published articles are added to a list (note the source of that page looks much different than the actual page). It then uses that list of articles to display leads on the demo main page (with the leads being located on subpages). Ideally the list and lead subpages could be auto-generated by user-javascript, with no (or little to none as auto making leads might not always turn out perfect) user intervention. Comments appreciated. Bawolff ☺☻ 02:40, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Bawolff, the randomly changing leads don't work for me. Is it a browser issue perhaps? In any case, I'm not sure I like having all leads, and no list of recent articles. Some articles could still end up slipping through the cracks. Plus it's going to take some effort to create a subpage for every published article, much more so than simply maintaining the leads. Tempodivalse [talk]  18:48, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

[unindent] I've done some tweaking in the sandbox, and I've come up with this. Basically we have five leads, and then a DPL listing recent articles below. Anyone think this would be a good idea? Open to comments and suggestions. Tempodivalse [talk]  18:48, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * The line-height on the titles of the second level leads looks a little weird to me, but i like the general design idea. Bawolff ☺☻ 00:53, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Leads
Ok I think we need a new style. I don't have time right now to go looking in the history of the main page, but I recall we used to have leads almost exactly the same as the way the NOAA has them. http://www.noaa.gov/images/feature_resources0509_2.png I also used to say they stole that format from us, because we had the same Idea before them :-P Anyway I also recall it was a pain in the ass to update the leads and resize the text and etc. Any way we can utilize something like this again, but more user friendly to update? DragonFire1024 (Talk to the Dragon) 11:52, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * You mean a lead style similar to the one at User:Terinjokes/Main Page, where the text overlaps the image? I'm not sure I really like those as much. If the picture is dark, then it will be hard to read the caption. Tempodivalse [talk]  02:01, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * [edit conflict]If i recall, the main reason for the picture leads being bloody complicated was you couldn't use template style parameters with xml-style tags (parser functions? I can't remember the technical name for  style extensions are). Now we can use so we should be able to abstract the complicatedness away (hopefully). Bawolff ☺☻ 02:03, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * There's ways around dark images (for example we can use a semitransloucent white overlay, or we could use white text). Bawolff ☺☻ 02:06, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm still of the opinion that it looks ugly to have the text overlap the image, even if we change the background/text colour. I think our current leads are fine as they are. Tempodivalse [talk]  02:12, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I just think our leads are neglected a little. I liked the ones like the NOAA because they were more appealing. But if they are easier to update, then I think maybe we should test them. Remember the main page is the most important part of WN, in terms of new visitors. The leads, being the most important of the main page, should be as appealing as possible. DragonFire1024 (Talk to the Dragon) 01:33, 22 May 2009 (UTC)