wiki reorg - Main Page

Stroller stroller at stellar.eclipse.co.uk
Fri Jul 25 05:57:42 CEST 2008


On 24 Jul 2008, at 20:21, Justin Wong wrote:
> ...
> I did read most of the emails on this list and, although it's a bit
> unrealistic to answer every question...

<devil's advocate>
Well, either they're stupid or invalid questions (fair enough) or  
SOMEONE has to answer them.
</devil's advocate>

> - what do you think of the content on the Main Page?
> The Main Page should have as few "content" as possible. See below
> answers for what I mean.

I don't know about _as little as possible_, but it should certainly  
be clear, concise and navigable.

As I said previously:

   Surely the first screenful of text on the main page - the first the
   reader sees before they scroll down to explore further - should be
   *really* *useful* and *really* *informative* stuff.

> - is it suitable for people visiting the Openmoko Wiki for the  
> first time?
> I'd say, no. There's an overwhelming amount of stuff on the main page.
> I believe the theme of Main Page should be simplicity and it gets
> people to other pages.

I absolutely agree.

See also my previous comments:

     The "Introduction to Openmoko" ... section also doesn't tell
     newcomers the most useful stuff - the first link is to the
     "Openmoko" page which seems to be nothing more than a long list
     of random hardware & software notes all mixed together. Shouldn't
     the "Openmoko" page be more friendly?   ... who  cares about "The
     original core team" if they were last responsible for Openmoko
     in August 2007? Does "Trademark Policy" need such a prominent
     position? ...  Couldn't links to the Trademark Policy be relegated
     to the foot of the page? Likewise it has been stated in the first
     paragraph that "Openmoko is a Free Software project" - so surely
     we don't need to waste one of the following bolded links on
     "License"? (again, I feel that can go at the foot of the page?)

(both the above indented sections are from [1])


> - should it be? [suitable for people visiting the Openmoko Wiki for  
> the first time?]
> Or should it be suitable for everyone visiting the
> Openmoko Wiki, even if they've visited before?
> It's hard to answer this question without identifying the main groups
> of users of the wiki.

I don't really see how we can absolutely identify groups of users.  
The webserver logs don't say "newcomer", "openmoko user", "openmoko  
developer".

So I think we have to guess:

> Presumably, there are people new to Openmoko
> (without any previous knowledge), and then there are veteran core
> developers. Perhaps there are more categories of people. But these are
> my assumptions without doing any actual research.

Right. Let's assume these are two reasonable categories.

We can waste a lot of time putting a poll on the main page.
Are you:
- a newcomer to this site
- considering buying an Openmoko phone
- an owner of an Openmoko device
- a developer of application software
- a developer of core or kernel Openmoko software.

But lots of people won't bother answering the poll and we probably  
won't get much better results than guesstimating. Heck, even the  
categories we suggest create a bias!

> The wiki and documentation should work for all these people. We
> shouldn't cast anyone out.

Let's assume those two types of people you've identified above and  
add one more
- people new to Openmoko (don't know what Openmoko is, might have  
seen a Wired article)
- veteran core developers.
- people who have bought a Freerunner and want to play with it  
(installing TangoGPS, connecting to wifi, whatever)

What topics or pages should we link to in order to satisfy these groups?

Veteran core developers probably know the pages they're using often,  
so I don't think we need to have so many links for them. Additionally  
I suspect their pages are better linked together. But certainly some  
first-stop page-links are needed for them.

We also need to cover some of the legal & trademark stuff currently  
on the main page - stuff which we'll relegate to the bottom but keep.  
What? "Trademark Policy", "License", anything else?

Brenda: sorry, we're in agreement that the main page needs a lot of  
work. And I know you've already done a lot of work on it. Please  
speak up if these changes are going to be a problem for you.

Stroller.


[1] http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/documentation/2008-July/ 
000010.html




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