Wikidata talk:Portal Redesign

Comments from Filceolaire (talk)

communicate what Wikidata does and what Wikidata is for - this should be obvious!

The whole point of "What wikidata is for" is that it is open to reuse in a load of ways many of which no one has even thought about yet. It's a real 'if we build it they will come' punt up the field. For me that is one of the exciting things about it.

As for what wikidata does: that isn't all that obvious. Wikipedia articles have more information. Wikipedia info boxes have pretty much the same info as wikidata but in a format which is easier for readers. Wikidata looks a bit like a dumbed down version of wikipedia for robots. Communicating why that is awesome is not obvious. Filceolaire (talk) 20:55, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Infographic of the day?

Could we have a different infographic on the front page each day, generated with data from Wikidata? EdSaperia (talk) 16:05, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

@EdSaperia: - In my opinion it will be hard to produce an adequate infographic each day. And there should be enough time to discuss data trustability and neutrality of the infographic. We shouldn't compete with the often shockingly biased infographics seen in daily newspapers. -Tobias1984 (talk) 20:39, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

@Tobias1984: - oh, sure, well infographic of the week, fortnight, month, whatever. It would be cool if we could get it transcluded to Wikipedia main page as well :) EdSaperia (talk) 15:01, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

@EdSaperia: - I just remembered this page: Wikidata:Picture of the week. User:Addshore already once tried to get something like this rolling. -Tobias1984 (talk) 19:47, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

Take a look to WolframAlpha

They are the most similar thing that our potential new users could relate to, although we don't have the computational part. They use a very nice concept, a big search box in the middle and a collage of little images representing concepts. We could do the same on a "cruder" way. Prepare a mosaic of small images (taken from the items), each one linking to their concept. In order to avoid graphic satuation, the images should be grayed unless the mouse is hovered over one of them. The main screen should be as minimal as possible, or at least the upper part, which is the most visible, should contain almost no text. Now it is a mess that language list so prominent when we have the language gadget.--Micru (talk) 10:58, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

@Micru: - If I am not mistaken, the icons correspond to a certain query on WolframAlpha. A lot of them are rather simple and we could provide similar, and well sourced results. For example "What is the value of Pi?" would return numeric value (P1181) of pi (Q167). All we are missing is a query result page on Wikidata that is accessible to non-technial people. -Tobias1984 (talk) 17:35, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Translation

How about, unlike the current Main page, translate new version with Extension:Translate? Vogone, PiRSquared17 etc. ping :) --Base (talk) 13:47, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

@Base: Iirc, shouldn't. Because it can't support disambiguation (e.g. Wikidata:Галоўная_старонка (Belarusian Main Page) has normal and tarask versions). --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 12:53, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

No. be and be-tarask are both supported and are separate. --Glaisher [talk] 17:10, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

A bit stability

I localized the new main page for my language and have done the needed improvements for RTL but may I ask you to don't do more radical changes or banner change at least for a short while or aggregate them and do it once (or at least please check if Persian translation still looks OK or notify me on the changes). Thank you. –ebraminio^talk 22:15, 4 September 2014 (UTC)