Archive:Community Pages

Personal notes for reworking wiki pages, but open to comments. --Larry Sanger

I'm convinced that the whole set of introductory pages need a complete reworking. Here are some observations, questions, principles, etc.

• The landing page is simply too complicated. Too many links, too many words, will be off-putting to many people. It's all right to have a lot of links, perhaps, but it's not all right not to have a very simple presentation.

• It would be fine to have most of the detailed links on pages prominently linked from the main page, but they have to be quite obvious. They have to be clearly labelled, clearly placed, and most importantly, the whole set of them has to be clearly conceptually organized.

• Some candidate "top topics," i.e., categories of stuff that someone landing on CZ might be interested in: a few good articles; approved articles; entry points; an entertaining summation of "what we're all about"; donation; recent changes; project home; a welcome letter; explanation of how to get started as a contributor (for general public and for editors); policies.

List of things to organize

In progress

Introductory and getting-started

• Join us
• About CZ
• How you can help
• How to get started as an author
• Intro to CZ for WPians

Help/how to

• "Help" (the page)
• How to start a new article (transcluded in the latter)
• How to edit an article (technical)
• Article Mechanics (style)
• How to use talk pages
• Images help
• Citation style
• Section (copied from WP without much change?)
• Searching
• Formatting math

WP-related

• How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles
• Introduction to CZ for Wikipedians
• We aren't Wikipedia

Policy

• Images help (also)

Organization

• Project home
• Donate
• Workgroups
• Communicate
• Friends of Citizendium

Article lists

• Live articles
• Approved articles
• Entry points
• Article of the Week
• New Article of the Week
• Random page
• Feedback Requests
• Requested Articles
• Approval Announcements

Communication

• "Communicate" page
• Notice Board
• Blog
• Forums
• Mailing lists
  • Citizendium-L
  • Citizendium-Editors
• Questions board on forums
• "Contact" page

Tools

• Recent changes
• Special pages
• Checklist
• Subpages (+ all the pages about types of subpages)

New user observation

Hi Larry. Something that struck me as I have been educating myself about CZ these recent days has been the absence of a left menu "Help" link in the basic CZ page template. "Support" was the closest but that was not it. When I have wanted to learn something (either editing tips or policy matters) I have needed to hunt them down. I notice a help section mentioned above but thought it worth mentioning that a 'one-click' "Help" as a single line link at left of every page would really (ahem) help. --Ian Johnson 10:11, 27 July 2007 (CDT)