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Topic on Talk:MediaWiki/Homepage improvements 2018

Overall entry points on current front page

4
Summary by AKlapper (WMF)

Top navigation box has been removed in final proposal

PerfektesChaos (talkcontribs)

Currently there is a list of five overall links above the three audience boxes. Basically this is fine, but should be reduced:

About this site
Fine
About MediaWiki
Fine
Download
Move into operating and installation landing page.
Not needed for page content editor, confusing.
Help and support
Fine
Contribute
Move into programmer’s landing page.
Not needed for page content editor nor site operator, confusing.
I doubt that advertising here will make article authors to software developers, at least not by placing a prominent link which distracts focus.
A general remark, perhaps in the footer region of the front page, might annotate that volunteers and professionals are developing MediaWiki and that everybody is invited to support. But that needs explanation and is not well done by a link with one word.
Other contributions are not at programming level, but translation, documentation, suggestions. This may be done by everybody even without technical skills.
In the footer region of every landing page and front page it might be mentioned that such non technical contributions are desired (naturally by sharing a template). However, it is not sufficient to say only “Contribute” since nobody will follow such link, expecting coding experience required.
AKlapper (WMF) (talkcontribs)

The current page How to contribute lists many different ways to get involved. They are not only for programmers; we also have translators or documentation writers in our community. Maybe "Get involved" could be another phrase instead of "Contribute"?

Regarding the overall entry points, I'm not sure I would call them "entry points". Again it boils down to which audiences we try to target.

ImPacific (talkcontribs)

While I do feel that the single word Contribute is sufficient to bring in proper folks, perhaps we could may be change it to "Volunteer" ?

Also it may not be best to move this section in programmer's landing page. Moving it into programmer's landing page would mean it is meant only for developers?

AKlapper (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Given that one audience that mediawiki.org is for are professional 3-rd party developers (examples which come to my mind Semantic MediaWiki or BlueSpice which just saw its 3.0 release), the term "Volunteer" feels ambiguous to me. I might volunteer my time, but I might not be a volunteer working on MediaWiki related things. :-/