Wiki layout

[JONATHAN WEISZ]

Hi, 
I may be a nobody from nowhere, but I've been using ubuntu since its been around and I've been waiting this whole time for the wiki layout to make some sense.  I'm at the local chapter of the ACM at Johns Hopkins where we give out ubuntu CDs by the bucketfull and most of our members are ubuntu users.  We're all sitting here and staring at this layout trying to figure out just exactly what's wrong and why it feels unfriendly and virtually unusable.   I find that the only way to get anywhere with this wiki is to browse it through google searches.  This is nowhere near as usable or fun as the gentoo wiki or the fedora wiki.

The Fedora Core wiki <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki> frontpage is nicely laid out in grouped panes and the color scheme makes the headings and links stand out from the background color.   Take a look at it, it neat and it runs on MoinMoin.

Gentoo's wiki <http://gentoo-wiki.com/Main_Page> is media wiki and has the typical mediawiki tabular layout, which is readable and allows for quick, attentive browsing.  There is a handy dandy sidebar with the major subheadings that puzzled user would be looking for: Man pages, How-Tos, et-cetra.  

Now lets look at the Ubuntu wiki front page.  Firstly its clear that this page is suffering from a dual personality.  Its some wierd chimera of marketing and support.  The Resource doesn't seem like it ought to include Presentations or Artwork in the top of the front page.  The community section is nice, but probably a deeper level of involvement than your typical user is going to look for, and in placing it in such a prominent place almost neglects the fact that the Ubuntu wiki is a community project.

Fundamentally this page is not designed to be interesting.  Thats a problem for a community participation site, and not a good policy for getting people to visit often to update, add, and use content.  


I'd like to spend the next three hours putting all of these disjuncted headings into their own panes and organizing things into priorities that make sense, but like I said, I'm nobody and definitely don't feel qualified to mess around with the Front page.   As the most obvious change we could think of, we've reordered the releases to put the most recent first.  

Ubuntu Documentation team, what are your thoughts about the current wiki?  Do you agree that the e.g. Gentoo and Fedora wikis are more usable?  This site has a lot of information already, but it would be so much more of a community builder with a nicer, friendlier layout!