Speaking of that bug, it seems to me that trawling through the wiki looking for stuff that can be linked and then linking it will go a long way towards closing it.

I got a mediawiki instance adopted at the group of companies where I work, and there's this MW extension we installed; FCKEditor (think it might have been renamed; damn you crappy memory) but the linking is done in a dialog which auto-completes against existing pages which is very nice and really helps increasing inter-page linking.

Maybe something for the Maemo wiki.

Er... this thread is not about the frontpage but about the http://maemo.org/intro/ section.

My reference to the frontpage is only about the link to this page.

Interesting ideas but I'll concentrate my November sprint worg in the Intro section without attempting to open the frontpage Pandora's box.

Could the Intro page be implemented in a wiki page instead? It could be protected, but even so people could mock up changes in subpages off their user page for, say, new and improved designs or better linking or what have you not.

Good idea. Let's start with a subpage under someone's wiki profile page, and once it's ready we move it.

Note that this means wiki right column navigation, though.

The wiki navigation column is a bit weildy at the moment but when yo think about it, it's a partial remedy (if populated accordingly) for the wiki dead ends texrat mentioned.

I was toying around with a subpage where I had shamelessly appropriated wikipedia's front page and was adapting it to contain the wiki's front page. It might be worth considering if Intro and the wiki's front page couldn't effectively be merged. As a bonus, that would help set the wiki front and center to community knowledge management.

Meh, we have already one homepage superdynamic and full of data. No need to have yet anoher one under Intro.

But the idea of merging Intro with the wiki frontpage is good! Me likes.

If the trend continues, Community and Development will end up being wiki pages as well. The conclusion is that all static content will end up wikified, and the rest wll be all contend based on specific tools. Makes sense.

While I realize it wasn't your thought, If maemo.org is to become a premier destination for the new N900 buyer, I think that redesigning the maemo.org home page should be seriously considered. The SUSE page is a great design for a new user. A bit more detailed but still very usable is http://www.openoffice.org/.

Right now the home page is obviously that of a developer community (not that there's anything wrong with that). The "Get Help" button will probably be clicked by a new user more than anything other than the downloads but it doesn't drop them anywhere in particular, just at a new page with more links, none of which are explained (not to mention that the Talk Forums links sends them to the ITT home page which then sends them back to maemo.org if you click on Forums).

The advantage of redesigning the home page is that it will help "keep newbies at bay" to use a just slightly condescending thread title. It will also afford the community an opportunity to structure a n00b's learning. If they want help, dump them at the top of the new user wiki pages. If they can't find it there, tell them where you want them to go next, probably either the New User or Enquiry thread or the Users category in the wiki (the FAQ in its current state doesn't have enough Qs to be useful).

I've stolen the wikipedia front page design and mocked sometihng up here just to see how it looks.

Skimming the thread, I found the following suggestions and tried to implement them:

• link to http://wiki.maemo.org/New_users (OK)
• link to http://www.youtube.com/user/Maemo5UITeam (OK)
• link to http://nokiaexperts.com/tips-shortcu...00-user-guide/ (NOK)
• comprehensive, pointing to places maemo and community should know of (NEEDSWORK)
• think about merge of wiki Main_Page and Intro (?)
• Try to include as many links from the wiki Main_Page and other key maemo landing pages

This is just a mockup, you got several options including but not limited to reworking it or saying "no, that's no good". It's just an option I've thrown up.

Some notes from while I was mocking that page up:

1. Do the categories make sense?
2. Have we got the right links in the categories?
3. I've started using the plain expression maemo to refer to the community. If the platform is referred to I'm calling Maemo platform.
4. Is New_users more of a FAQ, really?
5. A lot of the links which are lifted from Main_Page need a lot of work, almost look like stubs (e.g. Downloading_apps).
6. I didn't include #2 above because it's about the N900 not Maemo... feel free to edit it in.
7. To avoid redundancy I left out links which are present anyhow in the main site header.

Also, I'm sure I've made the CSS powers that be very angry with the colors. Sorry!

Very nice start JosefA! The layout is a bit cramped-- can that be spaced out a little more?

And I'm sure you could find a better quote-of-the-day.

EDIT: one suggestion-- in addition to a For Developers section, what about putting a small For New Users section above it?

EDIT 2: scratch that-- maybe the section should be For the Community and include smarsh's New User link...

http://wiki.maemo.org/User_talk:Josefdk/Intro_Mockup