Wiki Navigation / Main Page

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Currently the Wiki has a serious problem with general navigation and usability. I feel that at this time both the reading and editing of all articles would be greatly simplified by making the wiki more navigable.

The first page that needs a serious overhaul is the wiki main page. Currently there is a list of not very ordered links which I don't think is too helpful for most readers, or editors for that matter. We should focus on improving things here first.

My thinking on wiki navigation are twofold. Firstly, I would be hesitant to rely on Category pages for navigation purposes when it comes to the most important categories. In other words, we should not be presenting the Characters category page as an acceptable form of character page navigation. We should use a more visual and reader friendly navigation interface for such important categories.

Secondly, the main page should have its own design, distinct from most other pages. I think the design of the main page should function in a similar fashion to a site map/main navigation, showing the reader all of the possible content that can be accessed. It should also be visually interesting, staying away from the standard, undistinguished, wiki main page format, which I feel is a little dry. I'd also steer clear of things like "featured articles" and "pictures of the day" in this regard, as I don't think they are a) maintainable, or b) useful.

Having looked at a few wiki's the main page that most struck me was Bulbapedia's. The main page template is visually striking and comprehensive, and above all avoids the monotone text and hyperlinks I feel most wiki main pages suffer from, giving the links proper order and place. I think a page like this is what readers should see upon finding the wiki, albeit minus the "featured article" type links. Along these lines, the Zelda Wiki also has an interesting main page.

I feel the key point in the main page should be to present a coherent site map, and not a mass of unrelated and scattered hyperlinks. Moreover, further navigation pages should also strive toward the coherent model.

Of course, related to all this is exactly what the main page will give navigation links to, and how it will do this. Currently I think there are really four main sections which should be referenced (Note that these sections are not necessary distinct, and indeed should overlap)

1) General Wiki information on the series (This includes episode, characters, evas, etc)
2) Resources. Includes translations, articles, information about various releases, information about publications, and probably links to the screenshots sections.
3) Theory and analysis. Basically all the theory and analysis pages. Perhaps other material could be included in this navigation section.
4) Fandom Information: I feel things like fan art, amvs, cons, links to various evangelion sites, etc should all get a mention somewhere in the wiki.
5) The commentary project. It goes without saying that this would be linked to on the main page.

These are only preliminary thoughts on the main page content. However, we should also consider the main page design. What are peoples' opinions on what we should put there and how we should put it?

[Ironfoot]

I've been thinking about this one for some time. The main page is the most important page of the wiki as far as attracting readers is concerned. It definitely needs to be overhauled.

Well first off, I agree that category pages are a bad way to navigate the wiki. They exist for organizational purposes for editors and shouldn't be used as an actual way for site navigation. Instead of using Category pages, perhaps Special pages linked from the main page could be used to index characters, Evangelion units and otherwise.

The big problem is the design of the main page. It does need to be aesthetically appealing and easy to use, yet not cluttered with things like "Did you know?" or "Picture of the day." Largely, I think that the main design highly depends on the importance of the wiki itself. If people really get into it, the wiki could become the front page of the site, with the news updates being incorporated into the main page itself. If the wiki remains seperate from the front page, then more information and links to Evangelion information would be prevalent.

As it stands now, the Eva wiki does not take up the traditional left frame of navigation links, search bar and the toolbox found on wother traditional wikis. If the Eva wiki becomes more important, I would argue reinserting this in order to navigate the rest of the site.

In any case, I do have a possible design in mind, which is made up of (minus the traditional left frame) a top frame with one or two frames below it. The top frame could incorporate the general navigation of the wiki. One of the side frames could have wiki and/or site announcements and news. The second frame could be used for a variety of things, perhaps being exclusive to Rebuild information. There are a lot of options.

I generally agree with OMF's suggestions on how to organize the general navigation. I think the Theory and Analysis pages would have to be closely eyed once they get bigger exposure. The Discussion pages could easily turn into a mini forum with heated debates.

[The Eva Monkey]

I'm thinking more and more that I need to find the time to give the site an over-arching design overhaul. The site as a whole really needs a unique and unified look.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Visual distinctiveness between different sections can aid navigation though. In fact, the Commentary pages on the wiki are all using a different background and font to the rest of the pages for this very reason.

Having said that, if you want to design a mockup of the wiki main page, I'm all ears.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

We've left this issue for far too long and something, anything needs to be done about it. Anything to get the ball rolling again. I would request that all scribes, and indeed regular posters, try to contribute to the problem of the main page templates in this thread.

To set the ball rolling, I've currently made a proposed mock up of the main page EvaWiki template. It is currently very crude, and I was hoping people could make suggestions on how to improve it (particularly css/style related suggestions, as it is particularly primitive at the moment).

Regarding the template content so far: What is the template currently missing? What other information could be referenced on the front page? How can the presentation be improved? What's missing? What's extraneous? What editing could be done to make these clichéd blurbs more presentable and less cringe-worthy? How do we allow readers to navigate to any wiki pages in only a few clicks?

But this is only the template for the "EvaWiki" section of the Mediawiki installation, and moreover, only the template for the "factual" information. Other templates will be needed for other sections, such as; The commentary, wider fandom, theory and analysis, etc. Again, what is needed here? Templates should eventually be created for all such sections, but for now, I think we should focus on the main "Encyclopaedic" content.

In addition, note that the "More" references in the template do not take the reader to default Mediawiki category pages. We should avoid these; as discussed above. Instead, the reader is taken to a "Portal" page (most of which are currently blank), which will hopefully give a more visual, useful and help way to access the various wiki topics. I've drawn up a prototype Character's portal page as an example of what could be presented. Again, as with the EvaWiki template for the main page, this needs improvement, both in terms of visuals and content.

Any and all comments and suggestion of how to improve these pages and template is appreciated, from scribes as well as regular forum members. I'd request that as many people as possible make suggestions (and indeed edits), so we can really get moving on making the wiki better.

[Sailor Star Dust]

The sample template for a main page looks good, I think. And the examples used in each subsection (other publications, Angels, etc) is good.

My only comment is each subsection should probably have it's own image, the the "more" category in each section should link to a portal list subsection of what's in that category (I have no idea what you call that, but as an example, the Evangelions have their own nice and neat category, same with the human cast).

And I think a nice light blue (for instance, the color that Evacommentary had) would be a good background universal wiki color instead of just plain old white.

Apologies if this post doesn't make a ton of sense, I'm half-asleep whilst replying.

(And to clarify, we have plenty of maintenance templates, some of which I made awhile ago. I'm sure we don't need anymore.)

[Seele00TextOnly]

...

[Axell]

Wow, until now I thought the wiki didn't even have a search function

[Sailor Star Dust]

Oh, by the way, I hope to make one of those sub-category things (somebody please give me the name of what you call that box ) for the video games category and possibly the manga category as well. I hope to do that this coming weekend but I guess I'll see.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

SSD, do you mean the infoboxes?

The traditional wiki side panels were something that was removed quite early on. I'm not sure how much these are really used in other wikis. The "whole page" style of the wiki is something which I personally think should be kept to a) distinguish the wiki visually from the standard Mediawiki affairs (The site only runs on Mediawiki software, not by it.) and b) allow articles to take full advantage of page space.

Obviously, people's preconceptions on how a wiki should look are a problem in this regard. We may need to find a way to nudge their attention downwards. Aside from this, with good enough navigation templates, we could make navigating the Wiki with its custom template even better than the standard method. I'm not keen to use the standard wiki interfaces as a site navigation method if it's at all possible to avoid it. (But then again, I have the aesthetic sense on an Angler fish)

The suggestions concerning the rest of the wiki are all appreciated, but right now, we need to focus on navigation aspects and templates. If anyone has any suggestions on content additions, etc, please mention them. In particular, if anyone has any "navigation content" submissions which would save me having to think up of more blurbs and links, I'm all ears. Along this line, suggestions for navigation templates to other sections would be helpful.

Does the current EvaWiki template leave anything out? Obviously, the portal page are currently blank; but aside from this, are there important categories of wiki pages that are not represented in the seven categories currently in the template? What's being left out? Suggestions?

[UrsusArctos]

And I think a nice light blue (for instance, the color that Evacommentary had) would be a good background universal wiki color instead of just plain old white.

Agreed.

(And to clarify, we have plenty of maintenance templates, some of which I made awhile ago. I'm sure we don't need anymore.)

That's true, there are quite a few just lying around. We could always rework them and put them to use on something else, or scrap them if they're totally useless.

The Characters portal seems rather squished to me. It would look a lot better if it were broader.

[thewayneiac]

We need a Theory and Analysis section on the front page. Representative links could be "The Soul in Eva-00" and "Rei and the Moon", ect, then a portal to the rest as you've done with the current content.

There should also be a portal to a list of articles that don't fall into any of the listed catagories, all the stuff that only only shows up in A-Z, the three articles in the "Warships" catagory, ect. People need to know we have articles like "Bakelite", "Bart Howard", "Misato's Car", ect. without typing them into the search engine. The box on the front page could read "Everything from Antarctica to Yebisu!"

[Ornette]

I like that the background is different for the commentary parts of the wiki versus the "encyclopedia" parts. White background is fine. At some point, the site might be reworked so a better color scheme can be used.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I've updated the content of the proposed main page template, as well as applied the laptop boundary and some styling. The result can be seen here. All feedback is appreciated. Do people think this is ready to be put on the front page? I'm not wild about how the template is falling back in the case of narrower screens, but I don't think it can be helped a lot.

My intention is to also use the lapto-frame (with stickers) on other portal pages. It's currently in use on the Character's portal page.

I've done my best to make sure that the code runs properly on most modern browsers, the exceptions no doubt being IE7, IE6 and lower. Unfortunately, here are the stats for wiki browsing. Make of them what you will.

Browser counts  SPOILER: Show

[code:1]
# #reqs #pages browser
1 615203 83410 Firefox
602441 80872 Firefox/3
10417 2101 Firefox/2
1833 365 Firefox/1
235 28 Firefox/988705703
136 17 Firefox/9679035903
22 6 Firefox/998601874703
25 4 Firefox/98770197603
17 3 Firefox/
16 3 Firefox/8769093803
19 3 Firefox/788907689703
2 346933 60662 MSIE
217241 35449 MSIE/8
90928 16046 MSIE/7
37928 8521 MSIE/6
620 531 MSIE/5
134 38 MSIE/999
33 33 MSIE/2
23 23 MSIE/3
26 21 MSIE/4
3 159560 24102 Safari
79244 12208 Safari/532
52556 7667 Safari/531
11898 1738 Safari/528
4504 820 Safari/525
5956 748 Safari/533
3497 413 Safari/530
273 273 Safari/6531
1087 150 Safari/523
295 49 Safari/419
204 21 Safari/312
4 117515 112902 Netscape (compatible)
5 46556 9694 Opera
45767 9084 Opera/9
502 327 Opera/8
208 208 Opera/7
79 75 Opera/6
[/code:1]

This is a bit weird as IE7 and lower browsers don't work right with the wiki site layout anyway... I think.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The Character's portal page has been filled with images at least. I'm currently adding a few (overdone) blurbs for each character.

I'd ask people to look over the page and see whether or not it's working as a navigation page which is helpful to most wiki visitors. Also, note any errors or oddities that many be emerging, and note whether things are readable.

All comments (from all posters) are appreciated.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I've gone ahead by fiat and updated the wiki Main page to use the new "laptop" navigation main page template. You can see the results here.

From the main page template, the Characters, Evangelions, Angels, and Episodes portals have been at least created, but may need further work. Other portals exists only in a very rudimentary sense, and will need more work. The purpose of this overhaul is to make navigation to pages easier for vistors—and especially to avoid the default Mediawiki Category system for navigation, so those "category" portals will need updating eventually.

Any and all feedback is appreciated. Especially from regular wiki browsers.

In addition, I add that the laptop frames could do with a few more stickers if people can provide them.