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Main Page development

I have made an attempt to upgrade the front page to improve design, ease of use and accessability to the wiki. I have tried to focus on accessibility for new users as we need to increase online interest in our efforts.

Some recent updates:

Inclusion of a "Featured articles" on the front page (see user:Ioneill for development details).
Creating Marspedia:About page to move bulk text from main page.
Creating "Marspedia News" section on front page - for development purposes (i.e. new site developments/announcements), not to advertise new content.

Unresolved areas:

Copyright notice, should it be moved to a less-prominent position?

For now, over to you! -- Ioneill 04:19, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

I like the new appearance. It is better than ever! -- Rfc 07:43, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

It looks wonderful; I can't wait to steal it for Lunarpedia. 8) The copyright rules notice is too large and unwieldy, and as you may have noticed, in over a year I've not figured out a more compact solution that imparts the required information. Maybe a terse summary with a link to a more detailed version? How much can we pare down the summary if so? --Strangelv 08:30, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Hi James, I have seen several occurrences of "8)" in your talk. What does it mean? -- Rfc 09:10, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

It's an emoticon, akin to :-). I wear glasses, thus the eight instead of the colon... --Strangelv 11:28, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Cool, glad to get people's opinion on it. Kinda melded the Wikipedia format with our own - hopefully we'll be a unique set of wikis in time. I've been looking at the copyright notice, and I think we can work with what we have for now. We must keep in mind, we are in the development phase of this project, so there are going to be a lot of rough edges. As we will (hopefully) have a continuous, and increasing influx of articles, newcomers will need to read the GFDL terms and conditions first. Also, having the copyright notice there is in keeping with Lunarpedia etc., so it's a good visual aid to see we are all in the same "club"!

James, feel free to copy any of the design aspects and stick them into Lunarpedia, will be nice to see a cool blue and grey version 8) I think the divs and tables are up to par. Seems to be formatted correctly in Firefox and IE, so there shouldn't be too many issues with other operating systems. I've noticed a slight loss in border on the right side of the copyright notice when using FF, will get that fixed.

-- Ioneill 20:45, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia based articles

I personally support the public domain license, but isin't it alot easier to just fork all the required articles from Wikipedia, then edit them from there? Many articles should be almost complete copies from Wikipedia. Having a "GFDL" namespace seems confusing. Nawi 11:36, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Captcha

Can the captcha be disabled for registered users or something, because it's pretty annoying. Nawi 15:12, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Hi Nawi, I agree with you. Since I am an ordinary user I can not change this, but I can give you some explanation about the working principle of the captcha. The "gibberish captcha" is designed to pop up if the first word of an article is going to be changed (Please see also Marspedia:Captcha). Also, a captcha pops up for edits that add URLs and for Userlogin. We implemented the "gibberish captcha" when we experienced frequent attacks by a bot inserting gibberish into Marspedia articles. This captcha works fine, but is certainly a bit annoying when creating new articles. Most edits, however, should not trigger this captcha, since most edits leave the article's first word as is. If you experience a different behaviour, please let me know. -- Rfc 07:43, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Fountdation of an autonomous colony

Is the current FA going to stay on the Main Page forever? I swear is hasn't changed in the last 5 days. T.Neo 12:44, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

The process of nomination and featuring is not maintained on a daily basis, because nobody is willing to spend the effort so far. For a history please see Featured articles. -- Rfc 12:56, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

O.K. T.Neo 09:09, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

If possible, could someone write a step by step guide to featuring an article? I mean the coding procedure. I have FTP access if such access is necessary to change the article. I also need to do so on Lunarpedia, but haven't had time to dig through the code to figure out a way to wing it without screwing things up. I doubt that future users will want to go through all of that. -- Jarogers2001 07:01, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind, I figured it out. You guys put your heads together and decide which article you think should be featured and then clear it with Ian. I have this talk paged watched, so I'll know if you post your final decision here. I'll do the grunt work if Ian finds himself otherwise occupied. -- Jarogers2001 08:43, 29 June 2008 (UTC)