Toscany
commented
1 year ago indirectly, I had been giving this some thought. Glad to find the issue even though it might be a few years late.
In conversation with Mechan, I postulated, "It's my opinion that the wiki doesn't need a newcomer's roadmap to wiki, but instead that the pages we have are not effective enough. There are too many navigation buttons for the pages to all be dead ends. Because of the way it is, I think the average reader would resort to visiting each page in order by which the navigation menu presents them. If any one person decides to do this, I think they will quickly lose interest in reading all the pages because individually, they are not organized to be consumed from top to bottom. The topics jump around with [whipash] inducing changes of subject matter... One of the aspects of the wiki, that I began to look at was the logic flow of information. A quick & rough analysis of pages achieving their goals and whether there's a logical next step, would help identify underperforming pages and aid in wiki audience in digesting info it has to offer."
The Home page should accomplish introducing the newcomer to the wiki and provide direction, but it doesn't. The home page describes the wiki, invites the audience to become a contributor, and then provides an alternate navigation menu by listing a bunch of pages in no particular order other than some popular pages are listed first.
I think it's a reasonable conclusion that the Home page fails to do what a home page should which is to introduce and direct to the next step.
There's nothing wrong with providing an alternate navigation menu, but as part of an introduction, I think it's reasonable to include an explicit direction, "if you are new to AXI wiki, go
"One small part of a solution would, for instance, to be to move all the Guide buttons on the navigation panel up above Thargoid navigation buttons." Putting Guides first would be a minimal effort making the navigation panel more friendly towards the newcomer. I don't really think that impacts any other users substantially. I've now implemented this change. Guides are kind of the poster children of the wiki, are they not? i don't really know.
If the current webpages are strictly updated such that they accomplish their goals, and a flow logic is applied to some or most of them, then the aforementioned guide, when created, would be redundant instead of a necessity. That's what i'd like to see. In the meantime, I will begin a Newcomer Guide.
We will need to create a Beginners Guide to AX page that walks through all the steps and pages a new starter should read.
The Wiki itself has a lot of information that can be very imposing to a new pilot. We need a walkthrough page that shows users which pages are relevant to them.