[Foundation-l] Design for wikipedia's front page (and corporate)

Fri May 19 18:59:46 UTC 2006

On Fri, 19 May 2006, arnomane at gmx.de wrote:

> Am Freitag, 19. Mai 2006 04:25 schrieb Elisabeth Bauer:
>> If you're a good designer, creating a
>> good layout for wikipedia - do you really want any design ignorant admin
>> later fiddling with it and maybe destroying it?
>
> Well there is a problem: What is destruction? I am very sure that some people
> consider some of our CSS hacks in MediaWiki:Monobook.css destruction of the
> given Monobook design.

Indeed...

> But as you have pointed it out usability is important and so I think we can
> find a good commons sense for some kind of "corporate design" with only minor
> local tweaks if we favour usability over fancy design.

Hmm.  "community design" ?

>> If we want to have a professional designer creating a layout for us, we
>> need to guarantee them that their work remains intact. My idea was,
>> though, to use free licenses but have some kind of social contract that
>> they will be consulted if any changes to the layout have to be done.
>
> Well there is the requirement that you have to credit the author(s). In case
> someone else did modify a design you can force people by license (let us say

We can even provide an archive highlighting past 'accepted' designs in 
their pristine state; we can't guarantee that a particular design will be 
up forever.  MIT plans a new main page design every day, drawing on 
submissions from their community; it works wonderfully.

http://web.mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/site/propose.html

-- Sj