>>> The Main Page on the OOoWiki is pretty much a long link farm page - a >>> large number of links which are obsolete or not really useful to 99% of >>> the people using the Wiki. > But please consider a phone-book, with 10K names and numbers. It is > 99.99% useless--except for the one entry we're looking for. > I suggest that link farms are similarly useful, and right up front is a > very good place for them. Like any farm, regular weeding and fertilizing > are required.
True, but in a phone book, the info is neatly organized in a logical alphabetical fashion and the names are in a consistent format... neither is the case on the Wiki. Pagenames are random... what seemed like a good idea at the time. Information is scattered all over - although there is a lot of ongoing work to group things by sub-page, and by categories, it is still very hit and miss. Link farms do definitely have their place, but we also don't want to link farm the entire Wiki. The hard part is finding the balance between the two... this is the same issue we are bumping up against with the Documentation Wiki pages... providing the right length of link farm to guide the users and developers without linking virtually every single bit of content in one page. > 1) Have pity on us old fossils, and put the type size back up. What size? Is it better to leave as is and use the text zoom features of browsers? ie in Firefox you can simply hold the Ctrl key and mouse wheel up to zoom the text sizes. > 2) These improvements help the visitors to get where they're going _in > the Wiki_. To help them get where they want to be, _on the page_, I > suggest a very old-fashioned remedy: the Wiki-style TOC (i.e., lose the > _NOTOC_) The old fashioned TOC works nicely on article pages, but on a landing page... if our Main Page is so complex as to need a Wiki TOC, we really need to rethink our Main Page layout. > Alternatively, this might be a good place for that "now you see it, now > you don't" technology (click to expand), for the sub-headers. This would > also reduce the *apparent* page-size, drastically. We need to hold off on the expanding section thing at least until after the Wiki engine is upgraded. I have had some trouble getting the extension working in the test Wiki (running MediaWiki 1.13.3) last week. Good idea though. :-) One thing I've noticed in random testing of that feature is that hardly anyone realizes that there is a collapsed section. Not sure how to handle that - but that's another topic for another time. C. -- Clayton Cornell [email protected] StarOffice - Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Hamburg, Germany --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
