Identify the important wiki pages. Then link them from the main page.
We have two kinds of content on this site: forum and wiki. They are different in principle: Forum debates are coming and going; we would like the best ones to be revisited later, but most of them are really not that important. Wiki pages are “timeless”; they are created to be useful equally now and in the future.
Our navigational tools already provide the right kind of visibility for the debates: we have the “Main” and “Discussion” pages, list of “recent posts” and “recent comments”. But this mechanism is not fit for the wiki. The “recent wiki edits” is good for noticing spam, but otherwise the recent-ness is not an important feature of the timeless wiki article. Wiki articles should be made visible by their timeless importance.
This may be a typical mind fallacy here, but I almost never read the wiki. I am mostly not even aware of what useful things may be there. They don’t get to my attention the way that discussion articles do. So I would like to have a better exposure of them at the main page (because I will probably not look elsewhere, unless something already caught my attention).
More specifically, I don’t want just three or five very general links, but of course I also don’t want to have every wiki page linked. Just enough to have the best idea of what can be found there; even if it means “expanding” a few nodes. For example, a link to “learning resources” is nice, but seeing a link to “programming resources” specifically would be much better. The best would be probably something like: “Learning resources (programming, poetry, music, etc.)”
I explicitly disagree with the following comment in wiki!Homepage:
This page does not have the following jobs: easy navigation for old timers (old timers will use bookmarks, or a good browser that’ll remember which page they regularly visit)
You only use bookmarks for something you already know it exists. And a good navigation map would be helpful to both old and new users. Having to make another click to see the map reduces the number of people who will look there. And rendering the page with a few dozen hyperlinks shouldn’t take more time than a page with five hyperlinks. And if you want to keep something super-visible, just put in on the top, visibly separated from the rest.
Identify the important wiki pages. Then link them from the main page.
We have two kinds of content on this site: forum and wiki. They are different in principle: Forum debates are coming and going; we would like the best ones to be revisited later, but most of them are really not that important. Wiki pages are “timeless”; they are created to be useful equally now and in the future.
Our navigational tools already provide the right kind of visibility for the debates: we have the “Main” and “Discussion” pages, list of “recent posts” and “recent comments”. But this mechanism is not fit for the wiki. The “recent wiki edits” is good for noticing spam, but otherwise the recent-ness is not an important feature of the timeless wiki article. Wiki articles should be made visible by their timeless importance.
This may be a typical mind fallacy here, but I almost never read the wiki. I am mostly not even aware of what useful things may be there. They don’t get to my attention the way that discussion articles do. So I would like to have a better exposure of them at the main page (because I will probably not look elsewhere, unless something already caught my attention).
More specifically, I don’t want just three or five very general links, but of course I also don’t want to have every wiki page linked. Just enough to have the best idea of what can be found there; even if it means “expanding” a few nodes. For example, a link to “learning resources” is nice, but seeing a link to “programming resources” specifically would be much better. The best would be probably something like: “Learning resources (programming, poetry, music, etc.)”
I explicitly disagree with the following comment in wiki!Homepage:
You only use bookmarks for something you already know it exists. And a good navigation map would be helpful to both old and new users. Having to make another click to see the map reduces the number of people who will look there. And rendering the page with a few dozen hyperlinks shouldn’t take more time than a page with five hyperlinks. And if you want to keep something super-visible, just put in on the top, visibly separated from the rest.