Problem
The current process requires communities to work with existing templates, HTML/CSS, and mobile responsiveness when customizing their wiki's homepage. Recent community feedback highlights this gap. For example, the Tyap Wikipedia homepage is currently mimicking another wiki's layout but remains incomplete due to technical challenges.
The target audience is new and small wikis who are just getting started, for example Nawat and Tyap language communities. While the Nawat language community managed to set up a homepage on their own, the Tyap wiki community is struggling. Examples:
Observations
The main pages of both small and large wikis were reviewed for design exploration: English, Portuguese, German, Hindi, Tyap, and Nawat Wikipedia. The format of the main page across Wikipedias is more or less the same. However, the content and frequency at which content is updated differ based on the size of the wiki. For example, on Hindi Wikipedia homepage templates may be updated on a monthly basis for current events, while on English Wikipedia they are updated daily. On smaller wikis, communities are sometimes unable to keep templates up to date.
Typical homepage structure (top to bottom), maintained through templates:
- Top banner with welcome message, invitation to edit, article count, and active editor stats
- Main page banner around community highlights
- Today's featured article
- Did you know
- In the news
- On this day
- Selected anniversaries
- Today's featured list
- Today's featured picture
- Other areas of Wikipedia
- Wikipedia's sister projects
- Wikipedia languages
Proposed solution
Introduce a homepage customization feature that allows communities to choose from a small set of predefined homepage modules, import templates easily, and edit content without requiring advanced HTML/CSS knowledge. Administrators can select modules appropriate for their context, grouped by community need:
Grow content
- 1,000 articles that every Wikipedia should have
- Wikipedia:Requested articles
- List of articles that need improvement
Contribute translation
- Link to most-used messages on Translatewiki.net
- Resource guides on translation
Grow community
- Event organizing related resources and tools
Increase content discovery
- Topic categories (science, technology, arts, etc.) linking to portals
- Today's featured article / Did you know / In the news / On this day
- Selected anniversaries / Today's featured list / Today's featured picture
Core components (always included)
- Top banner
- Main page banner
- Other areas of Wikipedia
- Wikipedia's sister projects
- Wikipedia languages
Design considerations
- Ability to choose which focus areas and modules appear on the homepage
- Mobile responsiveness by default
- Localization of template names and required interface content
- Communities can opt in/out of individual sections - only opted-in sections are generated at publish time, avoiding empty placeholders on brand new wikis
Future iterations
- Support for a custom HTML/CSS block
- Ability to pull dynamic content from specific sections or queues, e.g. {{formatnum:{{PAGESIZE:Wikipedia:Today's featured article/{{#time:F j, Y}}}}|R}}
- Ability to choose layout variations with optional drag-and-drop arrangement of modules
Design artifacts
- Interactive prototype link.
- Mockups and screenshots:
- Demo video
- Wiki markup templates adapted from big and small wikis: https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Starter_Kit_templates.