Thanks everyone for the comments so far! I tend to agree with Markus on the value of these platforms for engaging with the wider community. And while IRC obviously does not present the same concerns as Twitter or Facebook, it is simply not as widely known or used (especially by newcomers to FOSS) and therefore I think it's useful to at least point to other (albeit non-open) communication tools.
Another thing mentioned was not over-emphasizing these sites - a very small update related to this new Main page is the inclusion of social media icons; these could easily be done away with. I also think just linking out to Wikidata:Social Media is not a bad compromise... As for https & featured content - I can confirm what GerardM said about tools and other featured content being only temporarily showcased on the Main page (as of now, the WikiProject responsible for updating the section is aiming for a new update every three weeks). The WikiProject is also very much still in the stage of proposing guidelines and workflows to govern the selection of content - while I too worry that this might exclude a number of the tools, I encourage people to propose a rule about not including non-https content if they think this is an important principle: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Interesting_Content/Proposals Finally, translations - once the new (English) Main page is launched, it will be marked up using the Translate Extension. Language links will continue pointing to the various versions of the old Main page; different language communities will have to take it upon themselves to update to the new page. On 22 August 2014 01:55, Markus Krötzsch <mar...@semantic-mediawiki.org> wrote: > On 22.08.2014 09:10, Lydia Pintscher wrote: >> >> On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 3:35 AM, Legoktm <legoktm.wikipe...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >>> >>> * I feel uncomfortable linking to Facebook/Twitter/etc. on the main page. >> >> >> Fair enough. How about we make >> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Social_media prettier and link >> to that instead on the main page? > > > I am not a big fan of these sites either, but it seems a bit too strong to > me to remove links to related external pages from the Main Page altogether. > What is important for me is that we do not over-emphasize these sites, and > that we do not include any of their active content (third-party Like buttons > etc.). As it currently is, I think we have a good balance. I would, however, > suggest an alphabetic (or otherwise neutral) order in listing third-party > pages. > > My deeper reasons to think that we should keep these links are as follows: > We use these sites to engage a greater community, especially people who are > newcomers to Wikidata/Wikipedia/Wikimedia. If successful, this will also > help more people to understand our values of openness and transparency. I > think that these values may not be fully shared by all of the sites that we > link to, and this is why I am critical about them -- yet I think in order to > change this it is more effetive to reach out to their users than to build up > barriers. > > Cheers, > > Markus > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikidata-l mailing list > Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
