Talk:Main Page

Note: This page is only for discussing the text on, and layout of the wiki Main Page itself. For main discussion venue for the wiki itself see Talk:Wiki. It is not the right place to discuss broader issues or ideas about how to improve the wiki (for that see WikiProject Cleanup) or to ask general questions (try other Contact channels).

Discuss BEFORE adding things

Obviously the Main Page is important. It has a significant role to play in shaping people's view of the project. The design of the page needs to reflect the correct weight of importance of pages being linked to (and not link to pages which are not important) There's nothing new or mysterious about this.

What it means though, is that we can't be having people slapping their ideas on here willy-nilly. For the most part we've been quite good about this over the past year or so (since we had a nice redesign of the homepage) but there's been a couple of, shall we say, 'under-developed' wiki ideas appearing as prominent links lately. So from now on the rule is simple...

Do not add/change things on the Main Page without discussing on this talk page first (and preferably leaving the discussion open for a while before applying a change). Edit's of the Main Page in violation of this rule, should be reverted.

Note that discussing your idea does not make your idea immune from being removed! It just means it is not in violation of this rule. It might still be deemed inappropriate for the Main Page.

I'm hoping that this will be universally accepted as common sense. If someone wants to argue about it, then I might have to write a "Wiki Policy". Don't make me do it! I will you know!

-- Harry Wood 16:08, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I understand the issue and respect it, but I completely missed this remark when editing my undiscussed change. On a closer look I found out that there is a comment in source of the Main page. My suggestion would be to make the comment as large as the editing page so you cannot miss it -- User: Altijd Verdwaald Sept 3, 2009

OK I've made that comment a bit more prominent -- Harry Wood 17:21, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

I've also added a similar comment to Template:Portals because people have been sneaking new links onto that template. May need to do the same for all the other included templates. -- Harry Wood 11:33, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Stats

I think the biggest casualty of this change is that interesting information about project has gone missing. Daily stats and other stat graphics have no access point. I finally found the user stats link on a German language page. I would think that stats would be an important use case. At least that's what inspired me as a young mapper. (Dr Kludge) 25 Aug 2014

I would say that https://www.openstreetmap.org/stats/data_stats.html is not something worth linking from main OSM Wiki page Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 06:26, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

Has anyone got proposal for something linkable? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 14:33, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

Resolved: Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 11:38, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

'No-knowledge rule'

I've just made a couple of minor changes to the Main Page without discussion, before I saw Harry Wood's flag at the top of this page saying no changes unless discussed. But ploughing on...

As a relatively new mapper (and a teacher), I feel a lot of OSM material, most noticably the wiki, is inadvertently written for insiders using in-group jargon. That creates barriers for newcomers, and tends to make for a closed and inward-looking community.

So especially on the Main Page, I'd suggest a 'no-knowledge rule' - everything should be intelligible to someone with no knowlege of OSM.

That means rather than a post about DWG, we would spell it out as the Data Working Group, with a link to their page on the wiki. (I'm not even sure that OSM shouldn't be avoided as an in-group acronym, but didn't attempt to change that.) Eteb3 (talk) 21:38, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

I support this, but the correct place for discussing general wiki issues in the wiki is Talk:Wiki. ;-) --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 17:14, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the support and for the info: I wasn't aware of that page. That said, my point was about the Main Page most especially: as the first contact many people will have with the wiki/with OSM, I think it's especially important. The wiki in general is a bigger ask for another day. :-) Eteb3 (talk) 22:08, 27 September 2019 (UTC)

Rendering on mobile device / smartphone

Currently the main page is not really readable on a mobile device because the tables ("Use Openstreetmap" / "Contribute free map data" / "Software Development") and ("Image of the week" / "Event Calendar") are too broad. Would it be possible to rearrange the layout on smaller screens? For example, the "Contribute free map data" could be below "Use Openstreetmap" etc. --Westnordost (talk) 15:04, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Agree it's pretty bad at the moment. I believe it should be possible by replacing the tables with more responsive custom CSS. --Tordanik 11:13, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

@Westnordost: Would you mind creating a draft of an improved version? You could use Main Page/test. --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 22:07, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Oh sorry, I missed your message, @Tigerfell:. Sorry, probably not. I am not experienced in wiki editing. Even if it was HTML, I wouldn't know exactly how to CSS it to be responsive. So I can probably not help there --Westnordost (talk) 23:50, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Changelog

How about adding a link to Changelog somewhere? maro21 19:40, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

Looks like nobody objected. Should I add this to "Contribute free map data" like "Browse the map feature documentation and the changelog"? --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 18:18, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Anywhere, but I think News section would be better (at the top or bottom) :] maro21 23:14, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Well, it does not really fit to "elsewhere" and I think the link should be a bit more descriptive. I would not know what "changelog" means in an OSM context. That's why I did not edit anything yet. @Maro21: You can just edit the news section via Template:News. It is not protected. --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 10:14, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Yea, I've already discovered that I can edit News template. This is how I did on the Polish version: the link to Changelog I linked as "Recently voted/approved tags". Hmm, can we change "Elsewhere" to "See also" and add a link [[Changelog|Recently approved tags]] there? maro21 20:44, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Sounds good. --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 22:38, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Uh, it's not so easy. "Elsewhere" has translations in many languages, so I can't simply change it to "see also". But in my opinion these strings in other languages should be removed because News template has its own versions in other languages and the rest of languages are inactive on this Wiki. maro21 20:02, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Mention license handling

Would it be a good idea to mention https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Wiki#Designing_policy_for_handling_files_without_clear_license ? To my surprise so far basically noone commented despite that it affects over 20 000 files uploaded to OSM Wiki. Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 11:37, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

You could put it in the news section. If you want more feedback, you can post mention the discussion on the talk mailing list or initiate a post on weeklyosm.eu. --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 12:59, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

Platform status

Platform status information is updated only manually and never reflects a real time status. Some people seem to even assume this is being updated autoamtically: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2022-June/008367.html . As this is all highly confusing, I'd suggest to add some more explanations right next to the "Platform status" to make clear that it's only updated manually and does not show real time status information Mmd (talk) 13:13, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

IMHO the best way to prevent misunderstanding is to remove any green default display. Just a link to the platform status page, for the case if there is no current message. The other coloured displays for showing actual issues can (should) be kept, so if one provides a message, it will be noticeable. --Chris2map (talk) 13:32, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

It seems to be about Platform status. I would propose to delete not maintained https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Platform_Status&action=history and remove its use for start Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 15:55, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

Right, this is about Platform status (or rather, the template with status information, which is also included on the main page). It used to be quite relevant a few years ago when outages were much more common. Nowadays it's barely adding any value. Mmd (talk) 16:12, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

@Mmd: is there some automated version which is likely to be understood by nontechnical people? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 15:56, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

I think the only reasonable source for OSMF system issues is twitter.com/osm_tech - everything else, like uptime.openstreetmap.org, munin or prometheus are way too technical for typical users. In a non-wiki environment I would probably just embed the osm_tech twitter feed. However, I believe there's no easy way to accomplish something similar on the wiki. Mmd (talk) 16:12, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

I edited Platform Status and started removing various display, with plan of turning it into a small list of links directing to places where actual info can be found. And thanks for forwarding info about confusion! I posted also on Talk:Wiki to give other chance to comment before I will delete everything Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 16:34, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

I've retired the innocent green status display and put some information in to follow this changing. Have a look at Main page. Is that ok for a while? --Chris2map (talk) 19:44, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, looking good! That's pretty much what I had in mind. Mmd (talk) 08:46, 18 June 2022 (UTC)

Make links to Wiki guidelines more prominent

I think that https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Wiki is important but hard to find. The shortest routes by links are 1. via Wiki discussion in the left columns and then going from the discussion to the page. 2. via the tiny link on the bottom of the page. Maybe a box "Improve the Documentation" (like Use OpenStreetMap, Contribute free map data and Software development) on the Main page could link there. --Lkw (talk) 07:07, 7 September 2022 (UTC)