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Wikipedia - the Free Encyclopedia

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I don't like either. The fist is redundant and the second IMO in not very professional. Other suggestions? --mav

Heya, looks like someone discovered my little experiment :-). I do like the French look and feel, and hope we can eventually arrive at a pretty standard template for all Wikipedias (yes, I know, they're all unique, but it's really confusing if every site looks a lot different has the information in different places).

Some thoughts:

I think the title "Main Page" is OK. It may not be entirely obvious, but it makes more sense once you are used to the wiki concept than something like "Welcome".
The 60/40 width difference was only a kludge to ensure that the difference between the two sections - topical, editorial - is more noticable. I think with different colors, this split may no longer be necessary, and the 50/50 design certainy looks nicer.
Call me a heretic, but I really think using simple bold for the in-table headlines as the French do looks prettier than the large ==..== headlines.
I do not like the gray background welcome text on the French page. I agree that Selected Articles might be worth having in a different color. It would be great if we could come up with some logical reasoning behind our color scheme though.
1. Right now special and namespaced pages have an ugly yellowish background. The purpose of this color is not intuitively clear. It would be helpful if, whatever color is used, it is also generally used to indicate the same editorial/topical difference mentioned above.
2. Some Wikipedias, notably French and German, use colored dots for topical distinction. I don't know if that's a good idea, but if we do it, we should develop a standardized code.

Note that the French HTML is currently better, mine is a rather quick hack. It lacks the thin gray borders around the entire table, for example. --Eloquence 00:09 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

I dunno know. Perhaps "Welcome" would be the best and most obvious name.
No it is not just "kludge". Please read the discussion on this in the archive - I was convinced that it is better to have the split in order to emphasize our content vs our process. Above all else Wikipedia's first job is to be useful. It is also better the way it is from a design perspective since we do not have enough content (nor should we) to fill a wider COMMUNITY column. Also the idea that 50/50 is better since it is symmetrical is erroneous due to the presence of the sidebar.
H2 comes after H1 and H3 comes after H2. The way the live Main Page is now is wrong and serves as a bad heading example. H2 is supposed to be a bit big and it looks very nice to me as H2.
1. You should have seen the light purplish brown that LDC had on the beta last summer - YUK! I don't have any issues with the light yellow. It is IMO the least annoying color that could be used. I don't really view the colors we choose for the Main Page really should have any really deep meaning. It is enough for me that they look nice.
2. Please no colored dots - they are ugly and add too much visual noise (esp. if we go live with the temp version).

--mav 10:09 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

OK I'm testing the "logical color" idea for the COMMUNITY column. I'm not sure if I'm thrilled though...--mav

Actually I think it is growing on me. --mav

I was trying to copy and paste the more complete list of international wikipedias in their native scripts from the current main page, but for some unfathomable reason, I can't seem to paste the long list of symbols that display as Arabic, etc words. Can someone else do so? Tokerboy

Done. --mav

Without width=100% for Selected Articles that box looks ugly at higher resolutions (disembodied is a better word). IE 5 has a rendering bug that messes up tables set to 100% when the sidebar is enabled though. Damn Microsoft. --mav

While I like this test mainpage, I think the Esperanto mainpage at http://eo.wikipedia.org looks stunning. Perhaps some of their professional-looking visual elements could be integrated into the English mainpage?

Actually, the main difference is that they use the Cologne Blue skin, which you can use on the English Wikipedia as well if you create an account and set it in your user prefs. I don't like it myself for various reasons. --Eloquence 20:23 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

The box headers ("encyclopedia" and "community") are being clipped at top and bottom in IE5 (I'm at work) -- it actually looks pretty good, but I wasn't sure if it was deliberate :)

Mav,

 <td style="border-width:1px"> [text] </td>

This should result in a border around a table cell. -- Sam

Hm. I'm not totally sure what you mean with the clipped statement but as long as it looks nice it shouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately that td tag didn't work - it should have but it didn't (at least I can't see it in Konqueror). --mav

I wouldn't mind seeing one or the other versions of this /Temp on the front page. -- Docu 17:43 Apr 14, 2003 (UTC)

I just tried out a variation and immediately reverted it; you can see it here, from the history. I tried using '|' pipes instead of hyphens, and  's in front of them to keep them at the end of lines instead of sometimes starting a line. In addition to the fact that they save a little horizontal space, I like the look of using the pipes, though perhaps they don't separate the topics as much visually. As for the non-breaking spaces, on the downside, they add 5 bytes per space, but they do ensure that lines start with a word. After looking at it a bit, I think I might have even gone a step further, and used them within topics to keep the words together - e.g., I see "Shuttle" on one line and "disaster" on the next; "Shuttle disaster" would have kept them together. And on the gripping hand, it makes it harder and harder to edit the page naturally, the more spaces are replaced with that. But they're options worth looking into (the  's came from Talk:Main Page, I believe). -- John Owens 05:29 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)

After a bit of experimentation, it's clear that  's won't work well within the topics, because they break the links. You can get around this with a pipe ([[Cubana de Aviacion|Cubana de Aviacion]], for instance), but it just ain't pretty. :p -- John Owens 06:19 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)

Would it be possible to do a minor edit to the software so that the article count as a comma? eg 133,596 -fonzy

Hm. It's been a while since I looked at this page. I like the color scheme but I think it may look better if the blue fill was moved to the "Encyclopedia box" and then either have the "Selected Articles box" not have a fill or have a light-reddish fill (signifying edit links; yellow already signifies community and blue = hyperlinks). Either way IMO the result would be a more balanced layout. What say you? --mav

OK, here is a link to my idea: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Main_Page/Temp&oldid=1082256 --mav

THere is a stylesheet clash in Cologne Blue, where TH is assigned a line-height of 12pt. Some TH's contain H2 elements, and in some browsers the headings are trunchated, losing their descenders. Dramatic 11:47 26 Jun 2003 (UTC)

It sounds like Cologne Blue is broken. IIRC User:Toby Bartels is working on improving that skin so you may want to tell him about that. --mav

I just made this page use CSS instead of HTML tables etc. This design is shamelessly stolen from Cxefpagxo on the Esperanto Wikipedia. Personally, I like the gray background for the Welcome text, but if you don't like it, go ahead and change it (obviously). I also changed some of the colors when I copied the CSS, so I'll go back and change them to what they were before. I also changed the dashes to tildes, as I think it looks better this way, and the tildes also provide more horizontal space between links. --bdesham 16:36 27 Jun 2003 (UTC)

OK, I changed the color of the "Community" section back to yellow, as it was before. However, I seem to be having problems with the "Selected Articles" box. Can someone please look at the HTML/CSS/Wiki code for that section and try to figure out what I'm doing wrong? Thanks! --bdesham 18:17 27 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Once again -- I've fixed the "Selected Articles" box. I don't consider what I did to be an ideal solution, as it uses tables, while the rest of the page uses divs. However, it looks fine and I'm going to leave it alone -- for a while, anyway :-) --bdesham 20:30 27 Jun 2003 (UTC)

You had a single row table for selected articles - this meant that there was no alignment between labels on the left and groups of links on the right. I've fixed it, using gluggy markup which could be improved via css. Dramatic 20:50 27 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The pink section looks odd with the headers lined up at the colons instead of at the left margin. Can they be aligned left and align the colons as well? RickK 03:12 1 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Do you mean aligning the titles left, but still having the colons aligned? I don't think that's possible without significant spaces, which wouldn't look good. Personally, I like the right-aligned titles -- the current way (see Main Page) just has too many links that all run together and become hard to look at. --bdesham 03:21 1 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Looks great. I would do something about the downright feminine pastel colors. My only other gripe is the full-width "Selected Articles" table, which seems to be intentional. Kluge or not, the 60/40 layout is good. So when does this go live? -Smack 06:10 1 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the pastel colors are the only way to keep the main page easy on the eyes -- if we use dark colors, we'd have to use light colors for the text, and that gets hard to read quickly. As for the selected articles box, well, we could make that less wide, but I don't really see a reason to do that. If enough people want it, of course, it's fine with me. There was talk on the mailing list (not sure whether it was WikiEN-l or Wikipedia-l) about saving the layout change so that it's put up at the same time as an important announcement. The theory is that people will notice the layout change and start poking around the Main Page a little more, and that they'll definately notice the announcement in that case. --bdesham 13:22 1 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I was thinking that the colors should be grayer rather than darker. I tried to whip up an example, but for some reason td bgcolor doesn't work.

I don't understand the announcement thing. -Smack 18:09 1 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Don't use td bgcolor. We're trying to stay away from HTML formatting in favor of CSS formatting. For your example, change background-color: #xxxxx to whatever color you're trying. As for the announcement -- there will be a rather large announcement about Wikimedia fairly soon, and the thinking is that people will be more likely to notice the announcement if the entire Main Page changes. *shrug* --bdesham 19:40 1 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I had a go tinkering with the colors: I made the heading backgrounds stronger and darker, and the text backgrounds slightly darker and greyer. What do you think? It's such a subjective thing, not helped by the fact that everyone's monitor is different. BTW the Wikimedia thing won't be announced for a while yet: Jimbo wants to have non-profit status first and that could take a few months. -- Tim Starling 05:52 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The darker headings were screaming off my monitor at me; way too noticeable IMO. And the fill color for "Community" was chosen to exactly match the fill color on user, Wikipedia, talk and special pages. Please don't change that (the gray effect was ugly IMO too). --mav

mav: Maybe the "Community" fill color is indeed the same as the namespace fill color, but it appears bolder when contrasted with all the other colors. I say either scrap the attempt at parallelism (very weak, I'd say), or change both shades of yellow. (I never really did like the canary-yellow background.) Here's something I would prefer:

Selected Articles	Encyclopedia	Community
current events recent deaths special:newpages	biology physics chemistry camping	how to edit a page village pump sandbox wikimedia

-Smack 22:46 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Wow Nice, why isn't this the real Main Page? Poor Yorick 05:15 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes, I think the sort of tinkering we're doing now could be done on the live version. -- Tim Starling 05:52 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Changing the look of the Main Page is a big deal and this type of experimention needs to be finished and decided upon by consensus before we go live. We still haven't tested this enough and don't know if it will work with all browsers and versions. Patience here is a major virtue. --mav

*shrug* Suit yourself (on both counts). Here's a link to my revision, in case anyone wants to check it out. -- Tim Starling 07:12 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I think it should go live now. That way people will complain soon enough if something goes wrong. Remember, this is a wiki, after all ;-). Tim: I looked at your revision, but I prefer Mav's colors; yours look too much like playground colors to me, but that could be a monitor calibration thing -- we may be seeing very different colors. --Eloquence 15:07 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I prefer Mav's heading colours, and Tim's fill colours, myself. Allow me to demonstrate... :-) Martin

the german main page has a new design since a couple of weeks which differs from the most other designs. there was an election that shows that german-speaking people voted for the new less colorful design, which is very close to the c.b.-skin but even looks well in the standard-skin. may have a look there and decide what you prefer. --62.104.208.83 20:17 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Too complex, I say. -Smack

What do you mean with that exactly? --62.104.208.95 08:53 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

On second glance, maybe it's not, but the half-dozen haphazardly organized headings made a bad impression on me. -Smack 18:26 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Ok, thats right. But a simililar desing for the english WP would have just 4. Look at Main Page/Temp2! --62.104.208.91 08:21 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

OK, here's my idea: take the existing layout, but take out the overall tints in the sections, except for the "community" section, so that the colour of the box contents is the same as the colour of the page the user will then be going to. -- The Anome 20:05 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

With my minor fixes I would have to say that I like your version. It is a nice compromise form the previous version and the perhaps too colorful current version. The headings still convey the symbolic meaning I talked about before without hitting people over the head with color. --mav

Personally, I don't like the new look. IMHO, we should either have background colors in all of the sidebars, or in none of them. Having Selected Articles and Encyclopedia in white and Community in yellow is just unappealing. (Obviously, this is only opinion, but...) --bdesham 21:11 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I don't like, and have removed, the gray background for the 1st paragraph. I think with the gray it tends to discourage people from reading it. People will first read text that is on a background the same colour as the rest of the page, otherwise the eye drifts away from it like it's an advert or something... Evercat 20:55 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I agree - the gray background wasn't at all needed. --mav

OK, I like the new version better than the current front page, and I think it has all of its good points, less the bad points of big colour blocks obscuring encylopedia content. But then I'm biased. I say let's go for it. Anyone against? -- The Anome 22:17 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

bdesham has already objected. --mav

Can I at least remove the gray from the real main page for now? Evercat 22:21 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Try the new version with colored borders around the boxes, instead of color blocks. Better or worse? -- The Anome 22:49 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I have also added a gnat's whisker more padding to the boxes, to push the text away from the more visible edge lines. 0.6 em seems to work well in a variety of fonts and sizes in Mozilla. -- The Anome 23:02 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I agree regarding the gray box for the intro text, but I want to keep the current colors. I think they are friendly and inviting. I really like them a lot. --Eloquence 23:00 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

How about this for a compromise? Subtle outlines, pale fill colors. -- The Anome 23:28 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Fills are barely distinguishable, the contrast between headlines and fill is too strong, the white community box stands out, the borders are too strongly colored, esp. the red border. --Eloquence 23:33 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

OK, how's this? -- The Anome 23:49 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Heading colors still a bit too strong; red border should be somewhat lighter. I like the yellow tone. --Eloquence 23:53 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

OK, I'll stop editing, please adjust to taste: I think we are converging on a good design which should incorporate the best features of new and old. -- The Anome 00:00 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

OK, I changed the bright, stand-out borders around the boxes to be the same color as the background of the box title. I think that this is logical, and that it helps the border to blend in a bit better. As always, comments (or strings of hundreds of consecutive edits ;-)) are greatly appreciated. --bdesham 02:59 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

good -Smack

Now it looks a little too baby-soft, IMHO. --Eloquence

I like the German Wikipedia style layout. -fonzy

I have now changed the top table markup:

valign="top" is used for the headings, so they don't drift down when the page is narrow
an extra table row can now be removed: if you want to force a newline in the anniversaries, try using <bt> ...

This should look almost identical. Works well in Mozilla. -- The Anome

-- The Anome 09:10 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Removing the extra table row appears to do weird things to IE's display: backing it off... -- The Anome

OK, the valign stuff is nice, and works cross-browser. However, there is deep magic going on with the tables, which I don't understand, but clearly someone has gone to some effort to make this work across browsers. I'll stop fiddling with it. -- The Anome 09:23 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I've seen elsewhere that apparently this page, and, by extension, the entire Wikipedia, is in agreement that the new Main Page is 'better', so I'd like to add some discord: I think the use of colour is vile, headache-inducing, positively pointless and detracts both from the usability and the image of the Wikipedia. But given that everyone who wanted the page to change thusly managed to agree that they liked the new style, obviously my viewpoint is of no consequence. I think the Main Page should be changed, however - getting rid of tables for formatting instead of tabulation of data and replacing with CSS would be a good start, for example. -- James F. 12:08 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I realise that some people dislike the color; I thought it was too strong, and tried to get rid of most of it; most people objected, saying they wanted the colored backgrounds. So I/we/they compromised by toning the colours right down to tints. I think this is a good compromise. -- The Anome 12:29 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

You are right about CSS; but it's difficult to do this at the moment in a way that does not break things in some very common browsers. Hence the half-CSS half-tables monstrous markup. Perhaps in a year to 18 months time? -- The Anome

Can anyone explain to me what the status of these "Temp" pages is, exactly? I was under that impression that they were just places to play around with ideas that might or might not be implemented in future versions of their "parent" pages. I wasn't aware that they were definitely to be used. I mean, what is someone who supports the status quo supposed to do? Are they supposed to edit the "Temp" page so that it looks exactly the same as the page it is desgned to replace? Or just go to the talk page and say, "Don't use this!"? Both seem a bit silly to me. And more importantly, is there any way of increasing the awareness of these "Temp" pages? I wasn't aware that there even was a "Temp" page for the Main Page for ages after its creation, and even after I became aware of it, I wasn't sure of its status, and never knew if or when it was going to be used. Clearly other people were also taken by surprise when the new Main Page was implemented. Perhaps we should come up with a policy on this. If a page has a "Temp" page, the fact should be displayed at the top of its talk page, where everyone can see it. And before any "Temp" page is implemented which would result in significant change, there should be at least a week of discussion (also announced at the top of the talk page of its "parent" page), and the change should only be made if there is a consensus to make it. What do other people think? -- Oliver P. 01:46 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I agree. Surprise there, I'm sure. :-) -- James F. 01:53 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)