User:NeonMerlin/Main Page
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- This article is about Main Pages for Websites, such as the the one on Wikipedia. For other uses of the term, see Main Page (disambiguation).
The Main Page of a website is the page presented to visitors who click a hyperlink or type a URL that refers to the site, but not to any particular page. A Main Page frequently doubles as a 404 error page. Its function is to introduce the site’s title, purpose, format and æsthetic style; provide links that will catch viewers’ interest and serve as a starting point for browsing; and, on many commercial sites, display advertising so that as many visitors as possible will see it. In the case of multilingual sites, Main Pages generally provide a choice of languages. Where the site logo appears on other pages, it usually links back to the Main Page.
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[edit] History
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[edit] Precursors
The Main Page combines the elements of the frontispiece, table of contents and index that have been common in mainstream western literature since the invention of the printing press.
An equivalent article for television is the test card or ident.
[edit] Early days of the Internet
[edit] Dot-com boom
[edit] Post-bubble
[edit] Modern Main Pages
[edit] Wikipedia
[edit] English
Wikipedia, being a complete online encyclopedia, needs to present many types of information on its Main Page. Centered at the top of the main page is the title banner. Directly underneath it are links to seven pages of general interest, and below it are the eight most general categories (each linked to a WikiPortal.
Below that is Wikipedia's familiar 4-pane view, which contains:
- (At the top left) the lead section of the daily featured article, with a link to the entire article.
- (At the bottom left) Selected events whose anniversary is the current date.
- (At the top right) Selected summaries of current events.
- (At the bottom right) Did you know on weekdays, or a Picture of the day on weekends.
Below the 4-pane view is a partial list of list of Wikipedias in other languages. Below this is a list of Wikipedia’s sister projects (other Wiki-projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation: Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks (including Wikijunior and Wikiversity), Wikisource, In Memoriam 9/11, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, and Wikinews.).
Although the page successfully presents all of this information, and thus serves as a great aid to navigation, it has the disadvantage of taking up multiple screens vertically, even on a 1280×1024 screen with a typical default font size.
[edit] History
The first year's worth of edits to the main page were lost during Mediawiki's transition from phase I to phase II, as documented on Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles. Thus, the earliest surviving edit was made by TwoOneTwo at 15:28 UTC on 26 January 2002. [1] Earlier versions are preserved on other sites (March 30, 2001 - [2]
Previously, the main page had featured a 4-line information bar, consisting of In the News, Recent deaths, Newpages, Anniversaries. Acting on a proposal by Raul654, maveric149 added the featured articles (newly renamed from "Brilliant Prose") to the main page on January 14, 2004. [3]
A coordinated new look for the Main Page appeared in February 2004, and the listing of important overview articles was replaced by a single link to Template:WikipediaTOC on 25 February. The new look did away with editing directly on the main page, and generated main page content primarily through template transclusion. Hand-chosen entries for the "Daily Featured Article", "Anniversaries", "In the News", and "Did You Know" completed rounded out the new look. On 26 February, maveric149 implemented the first entries of an automated archive for the "Selected anniversaries" which appear on the Main Page. This feature updates daily on the Main Page of the English Wikipedia.
In an instance of security through obscurity, the templates used to generate the main page content (whose locations were not well advertised) remained unprotected and editable to anyone, logged in or otherwise. Vandalism, though it did occur, was infrequent. However, following offensive vandalism to the featured article blurb on November 16, 2004, the featured article blurb was protected. (Felix the Cat was the featured article of that day, thus it is known as the 'Felix the Cat incident'). The other templates and all pictures remainined unprotected until another such incident in January, 2005, which resulted in all templates and pictures used on the main page being routinely protected.
On August 6, 2004, the featured articles were switched over to use the same automated-archiving system used for the selected anniversaries. As well as making maintence far easier, for the first time it allowed a queue of scheduled featured articles.
The look of the main page was further changed in mid-2005. On 16 July 2005 the English Wikipedia began including the day's featured picture on the main page. The original proposal was to replace "Did you Know" with the featured pictured, however, a compromise was reached. The featured picture is displayed on Saturday and Sunday, with "Did you know" resuming its usual position on weekdays.
[edit] Other languages
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The Main Pages for Wikipedias across language differ greatly in presentation style (colours, page borders, heading font sizes and use of bolding). However, they all present basically the same information (although less-developed Wikipedias, understandably, focus less on featured articles and more on Collaborations of the Week), and a similar set of navigation links. In languages that read right to left, the framework is reversed. Also, subject icons (when used at all) are either Nuvola icons or a blue set known as P icons.
[edit] Interlingual portal
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In the past, the main page for all-language Wikipedias (http://www.wikipedia.org — no language subdomain) redirected to the English-language main page. However, in January, 2005 (?), this was changed into an interlingual portal.
The portal is much simpler and more elegant than the Wikipedias’ individual Main Pages, but again sacrifices compactness, occupying multiple screens on most browser configurations. It showcases the Wikipedia logo and the ten largest Wikipedias, with a search box below (where one can select and search any of the top ten Wikipedias). Below the search box is a partial listing of smaller Wikipedias and sister projects, and finally the MediaWiki logo.
[edit] Google
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Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (May 2008) |
[[|left|thumb|Google’s Main Page’s unusually spartan, uncluttered appearance and quick loading time have contributed greatly to the site’s mass appeal.]]
Google’s Main Page is the most popular individual page on the World Wide Web. In sharp contrast to Wikipedia, its famously minimalist design displays almost no information at any one time. The theory behind this is that Google is not intended to be browsed, and those seeking information will find it on such pages as [4] and [5]. By making this sacrifice, the Main Page achieves a fast loading time (even for dialup users), viewability at low screen resolutions, and a clean interface. This benefits regular visitors at the expense of newcomers (“nooglers”). This is seen as a fair trade-off, since the former make up the majority of Western Internet users today.[6]
[edit] Logo
The Google logo, the only image appearing on the Main Page, is changed several times a year, to reflect holidays (Christmas, Easter, Hannikuah) , sporting events (such as the Olympics), and the anniversaries of the birth of historical figures (such as Louis Braille and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart).
[edit] Mobile
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Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. |
PDA and mobile phone users, who have the lowest screen resolutions of all, can access an even more compact Main Page. It has no help link and omits such searches as Directory, Groups and News. (Some RSS readers can provide mobile news, but there is no mobile version of Google Reader.)
[edit] Slashdot
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Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. |
[[|thumb|left|Slashdot’s Main Page]]
Technology news site Slashdot needs to post as many articles as possible on the Main Page. The resulting layout requires scrolling and is aesthetically questionable, but quickly and efficiently presents a large amount of information — in this case, article excerpts.
[edit] Criticisms
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The factual accuracy of this section is disputed. Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page.(May 2008) |
[edit] Socioeconomic
Despite the intents of authors and editors, Main Pages have come under attack as being, inevitably, a judgment of priority. A Main Page, these critics say, is the last page created, as it requires all the others to be in place, and yet its position suggests that it is the most important and first page of all other pages. In the words on one critic, “The paradox of the artifactual creation taking priority over the culture itself is the paradigm of a late capitalist information model, whether it is the Table of Contents in a book or the Main Page on a web site; its primary function is to make the bourgeois consumer of information believe that she, with her middle brow capabilities, is mistress of the book by being capable of [navigating with] the Table of Contents.”[citation needed] Along these lines, the Table of Contents in book production grew most elaborate during the times of greatest colonialism and began to disappear in post-colonial economies, and information theorists argue that the increased usage of the Main Page in the world wide web suggests an inherent hubris of the "computer age" empire.[citation needed]
Such Marxist analyses have had few answers, but Dr. Io Gadfley, in Information Theory and its Discontents, argued that writing about main pages, tables of contents, and indexes made the critics guilty of repeating the same gesture of control. Their own writings were possible only after all the content was present and after all the organization of content was made, and it then attempted to seize the lead position (what Dr. Gadfley calls "top-posting") from the book/website altogether. Further, she says, writing an article about main pages is as hypocritical as writing the main pages themselves. According to Dr. Gadfley, "The vertiginous paradox of moral turpitude involved in writing about people writing about what is in a website in the form of the Main Page is something that is beyond comment here, for fear of only deepening the maelstrom" (Gadfley, 30). "Nor," she writes, "is the veil of irony sufficient to obscure Caliban's face grinning back at us." (At the end of her essay, Dr. Gadfley suggests, instead, subsistence agriculture as the only honest work.)[citation needed]
[edit] Psychoanalytic
As a practical matter, those who are engaged in the production of the website treat the main page as a position of honor and quarrel consistently over its composition. Psychoanalytic criticism suggests that these Main Page Anxieties (MPA and Main Lemma Anxiety, or MLA, are both pending recognition in the official taxonomy of affective disorder[citation needed]) are a reflection of the neurosis of the book. According to critics from Harold Bloom to Jacques Lacan, the impulse to write and present to the world is a fundamentally neutoric act, and some pathology must exist in the author.[citation needed] There have always been more people with this "neurosis of the book" than there have been readers for books (or books themselves), and capitalist information culture presented a choke-point in the form of the commercial presses. With the world wide web and its demoticism, and particularly with community web sites, this stumbling block is removed. As all with the impulse/malady can write and publish, all can satisfy their needs. However, a criticism of the Main Page is that the authorial neurosis is not about exhibition, but about feedback and praise: the book must be "out there," but it must also be "read" and "liked." Web authors face the paradox of publishing freely but being invisible by being only one in a site of thousands. Therefore, all front pages and main pages must reintroduce the anxiety of (phallic/yanic)[citation needed] insufficiency to authors, as they act as a locus for all authorial frustrations. Each author wishes to be "on" the Main Page, because each author's ego is validated only by being read.
[edit] Other criticisms
The concept of the "Main Page" has also been criticised as a static point of reference in an otherwise dynamic work. The Main Page lags behind changes elsewere, harkening back to a more hierarchical period in the development of literature.
The very elements that endow a Main Page with its positive role, as a window upon the world and a central meeting place and clearing house, are responsible for its less wholesome attributes. Widespread vandalism to open-access areas means that Main Pages are invariably locked, moderated, or protected from malign influence, creating a rose garden behind barbed wire.[citation needed]
Lastly, many complain that the Main Page is ugly, "hideous," "too small," "too busy," (see above) and "stupid."[citation needed]
[edit] See also
