So I had a brainwave about this over the weekend. The home page for the developer page should act like a personal appeal only with __developers__ as the writers.
I think a personal touch is a great way to explain to a would be developer to why they should care about our apis and our codebase. Hearing from real people with real problems that they are solving in the real world would be an extremely inspiring way to get new people involved I think the home page should be written as a personal appeal to a new developer from ALL developers with links in the right places to the right thing. I think this should also be followed up by a randomised personal appeal from a developer himself - we should mix these between app developers, bug wranglers, feature developers, volunteers, employees etc etc I've knocked up a first version here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Hub In future I'd love to see banners ads asking people to donate development time pointing to these pages or at least see the donation page inform people that they can help in other ways. Is anyone else excited about this idea or is it just me...? On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 9:15 PM, MZMcBride <[email protected]> wrote: > James Forrester wrote: >> On 20 September 2012 08:54, Quim Gil <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Alright, let's move onto the next round: which dev hub? >>> >>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_developer_hub >>> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_hub >>> >>> mediawiki.org is a better default landing place for developers than >>> Meta, do you agree? >>> >>> Is it worth considering the merge of both pages, as it has been suggested? >>> >>> And in any case the API should be promoted upfront. Now the Meta hub >>> has no mention (I could find) while the dense MediaWiki hub features >>> the link if you are patient to find it (or you use the search, as I >>> did). >> >> Of course, we already have a link to the mediawiki.org front page on >> every page we serve - that's what the "Powered by MediaWiki" button >> links to. There, the four most prominent links are: >> >> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki >> * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Installation >> * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Configuration >> * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker >> >> I assumed that the point of this additional link was to take people to >> our API because we already use our bully-pulpit to ask for more >> developers quite strongly, but people who want to use us as a service >> need to dig further to even know we have one. If all we're doing is >> duplicating the general "hey, you're a techy person" link with another >> text label, this exercise will have lost its value. > > Hi! > > Sorry for starting this thread and then disappearing for a bit; it's been a > busy week. > > I've taken the (wonderful!) comments in this thread and on bug 33464 and > synthesized them into a requests for comment here: > <https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?curid=99106>. > > To address your point specifically, the "Powered By MediaWiki" button is a > bit of promotion (or advertising, branding, whatever) for the MediaWiki > software. What we're discussing here is something different. Based on how > other sites behave, I think there's a reasonable expectation that if you > want to figure out, generically, how to get involved, looking in the footer > of the Web site is a reasonable place to start. > > Most of my thoughts are in the RFC now on mediawiki.org, but my big > revelation earlier this week was that I don't think we really have an > audience problem as some have suggested. The people we want to attract are > all developers (which is why I suggested using "Developers" as the link > text). > > That said, I think the first step in the landing page should be to split _by > motivation_: > > * are you wanting to re-use Wikimedia wikis' content; or > * are you wanting to contribute code to Wikimedia/MediaWiki? > > From there, you can sub-divide based on programming language, component > (user interface, ops, etc.), and a bunch of other variables. My mock-up for > the tree/matrix/wizard is here: > <https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?oldid=585564#Blueprint>. > > MZMcBride > > -- Jon Robson http://jonrobson.me.uk @rakugojon _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
