[WikiEN-l] wikipedia homepage

Thu Jun 26 08:21:05 UTC 2003

Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
>May I change the layout of the 
>homepage of the English Wikipedia 
>to that of the Esperanto Wikipedia? 
>I think that layout looks much better. 
>I would ask this on [[Talk:Main Page]], 
>but not many people look there that 
>often, and this would be a huge change.

IMO that is HMTL madness -- WAY too many spurious colors that mean nothing and 
whose only purpose is to look "purty" in the eyes of the designer. We have 
already worked out a more conservative color scheme for the Main Page but 
were waiting for some earth-shattering announcement to make to go with the 
upgrade (such as "The Wikimedia Foundation is open for business and is now 
accepting donations!" - not that we would say that on the Main Page but we 
would have a link to a press release). 

See: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page/Temp
Which is based on: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page 

We really should be very conservative with making big noticeably changes to 
that page because so many people visit it every day. Making a big change is 
going to make people think that something is different and then they will be 
more likely to see the link to the press release (we did this for our last 
press release and it worked very well). 

Color rational: White is for articles (thus the background for the category 
links is white/unchanged), Yellow is for community (since all our user, talk, 
and wikipedia pages are yellow) and Blue is for hyperlinks. I guess red for 
edit links would also be neat (indicating there is always something else to 
cover) but that would be too many colors and red is also a bit heavy. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)