Topic on Talk:MediaWiki/Homepage improvements 2018/Proposal

I didn't like having a photo of developers when it was proposed in 2015, and I don't like it now. Granted, it's smaller now (which is better), and it's a different photo, but my objections are the same. The images and text on the front page of a website are meant to convey something positive about that software: does it make some difficult tasks easier? Is it a joy to use? Will it reduce your company's costs? An image of the developer group conveys none of those things; it actually seems to say, "we don't really care about you; we care about us".

Actually, the same goes for that "brought to you by a vibrant community" wording. What makes the community vibrant? And who cares if it's vibrant? People want to know whether this software will help them. And actually, I'd say that goes even for people considering becoming a volunteer developer - the quality of the software comes first. And developers are of course a much smaller target audience anyway.

If the worry is that the page will look too bare without an image, a sunflower logo could be good instead - that and/or an artful use of color could make things look nicer.

@Yaron Koren: Thanks for the feedback!

The MediaWiki.org frontpage targets several audiences (see previous phase "Audiences"), among them people who consider installing MediaWiki. Not mentioning our community would be ignoring a fundamental asset of the Wikimedia movement that the MediaWiki software and the mediawiki.org website is part of, and of free and open source software projects in general. A lot of actions, such as the "Get involved" link, would be unneeded if a company or some circle of folks that you cannot easily join in their work just threw some code project named MediaWiki over the wall. Numerous times I've seen people joining technical Wikimedia IRC channels asking "I want to contribute to Wikimedia and become part of your project". This group did not ask "Will it reduce my company's costs?" but they could easily find out by clicking the "Find out more and if MediaWiki is right for you" links if they wanted to. There are many different types of motivation why you start joining a project and community, one of them is altruism. Personally speaking, I do care if the community is vibrant as I will not join a software project community if I did not like the people with who I'm going to work together. It's not about 'caring about us' if you convey via a photo that there is a big, diverse and friendly community welcoming you.

Thanks for your response. You seem to be implying that more people are interested in becoming MediaWiki developers than MediaWiki admins... at least of the people who talk to you? I don't know. In any case, the merits of appealing to developers vs. users aside, I'm not aware of any software project, open source or otherwise, that tries harder to appeal to developers than it does to users on the front page of its website. Of course, MediaWiki is in a special case, because getting people to download the software is a (relatively) small factor in its success. Maybe there's an underlying question here, of whether it's more important to "pitch" to potential developers or to potential downloaders, that should be resolved separately?

As for "vibrant" - I didn't know what it meant in this context, but I guess you're saying that it means "big, diverse and friendly". Looking at that photo, I'm not sure it conveys any but the first of those. Does smiling for a group photo indicate that one is friendly? Maybe I'm biased because, looking at that photo, I see about five people who were personally rude to me during a contentious mailing list discussion last year, and they're all smiling. And actually, even "big" is a little suspect - there are certainly a lot of people in this photo, but this is a Wikimedia hackathon, not a MediaWiki-specific one, and I believe a good number of people in this photo have never contributed to MediaWiki or any of its extensions. Perhaps this photo should be disqualified simply on the grounds of false advertising?

I don't imply that more people are interested in becoming a developer than admin (and we don't have numbers on that anyway?). I'm saying that both exist. Furthermore I don't expect admins to get turned away by a photo of people who work on the pieces of software. (I admit that in a previous iteration I had a "Download" button instead of that image, but I realized that you probably don't want to download something before reading a bit more about it.)

The sunflower logo which you propose is already in the sidebar, adding it would be an unneeded duplication of content.

Whether MediaWiki is "a joy to use" lies in the eye of the beholder/user. Personally I don't believe that all areas of MediaWiki for all types of roles (admins, authors, readers, developers, etc) are a joy to use, hence I'm reluctant to say so as false promises don't help anyone.

If you have better actions or content which indicate that someone is friendly and which can be conveyed on a web page, please share them.

I imagine that a majority of Wikimedia Hackathon attendees work on MediaWiki or its extensions. If you know of any strictly MediaWiki-only Hackathon and have a photo of its attendees, please feel free to share it.

Well, I wasn't saying that the MediaWiki homepage should say that MediaWiki is "a joy to use" - and I agree that it's a matter of opinion whether it is, in fact - just saying that, when software homepages have a photo right at the top, that's usually the kind of thing that the photo conveys. I was thinking of sites like the Google Docs homepage - just some people relaxing on the lawn - or the Magento homepage - a woman using Magento on her laptop, but she doesn't seem to be working too hard; only one finger on the keyboard.

As far as I can tell, most homepages for open-source software don't show a photo at all. One website that does show a group photo at the top is the one for Joomla!, although that's an interesting case because, though I don't know who these people are, the strong implication is that they're Jooomla users, not developers. Similarly, the Wordpress homepage also shows a group photo, but (a) you have to scroll way down to see it, to the "community" section, and (b) it's a photo of users and developers together at some conference.

It seems like we agree on most things: there's no real way to show in a photo that the MediaWiki developer community is friendly, and there doesn't seem to be a photo that shows simply MediaWiki developers.

Where we disagree is whether potential users/admins would be turned off by seeing a photo of all the developers at the top - I absolutely think they could be, because it suggests that the people making the website have misplaced priorities. All I can offer in defense of that statement is just the fact that there doesn't seem to be any software homepage that puts a group photo of its developers at the top. In fact, I'd go beyond that - I don't think I've ever seen any marketing material for any product that makes a group photo of that product's creators the most prominent image. Surely there's a reason for that?

So, how about simply no photo at all? Most open-source software websites don't seem to have one, and I don't think people are expecting to see one.

Regarding "when software homepages have a photo, that's usually the kind of thing that the photo conveys": I don't believe that a photo of humans expresses characteristics of a software.

Looking at I could reply that "the strong implication is that they're Jooomla developers, not users." Without an explanation what a "strong implication" is based on it feels a bit like a bikeshed discussion? uses that photo to advertise "the biggest Joomla! developer conference". Some of the people on that photo are developers, some are admins, some are designers, for some I don't know either. But I'm not sure how it matters and what it would change.

I'm also surprised that using a Wikimedia Hackathon photo in the context of MediaWiki is challenged. MediaWiki is the main flagship software project of Wikimedia. (I hope that can be agreed on and that I don't have to pull development activity statistics per project.) Comments like "perhaps this photo should be disqualified simply on the grounds of false advertising" make me wonder if this thread is a serious conversation or if I lack sense of irony and how that irony is supposed to convey points to be made.

For the Joomla photo - I don't think "bikeshed" is the word you're looking for; maybe "pointless". But anyway, it's interesting to see the photo used in another context. So, maybe these are all Joomla developers, maybe it's a mix, maybe it's a stock photo, maybe something else. In any case, this photo doesn't bother me nearly as much as the proposed mediawiki.org one, maybe just because it's a much better-looking photo (no offense), with closeups of faces and not just a sea of heads. (I'd say that it's trying to communicate something about the joy of using Joomla, but clearly you don't believe in that sort of thing.) It should also be noted that Joomla might be the only open-source software that even has a group photo at the top of their homepage. I obviously didn't do a comprehensive search, but I looked at the sites of about 20 major open-source projects, and no one else seemed to have a photo of any kind, other than screenshots.

I also tend to dislike it when software mainpages show me unrelated images (I just want screenshots damnit! [but we're using MediaWiki to document itself so don't really need screenshots, plus anyone who finds the site is almost certain to already know Wikipedia, which is mentioned]).

However I do also understand that there are other types of people in the world than me, and humanizing photos appeal to some archetypes.

These sites also show a photo of the developers prominently (either as part of the autoslideshow, or a bit lower on the page) https://www.libreoffice.org/ and https://wordpress.org/ and https://www.scribus.net/

There are more types of people in the world than "me". It's good to keep that in mind, for everything from Wikipedia article writing, to help documentation, to mainpage layout/design.

Quiddity - thanks for that additional research. I think it actually bolsters my point: in none of those cases is the group photo the first thing you see, and in all of those cases the photo is presented in the context of a "project/community" section, with other photos/images for other sections appearing first. My main objection isn't to a group photo per se (I should have made the subject line clearer), it's to having that photo be the first thing that users see, which implies that it's the most important thing for them to see.