While those names are nice and descriptive, the problem is that they are very big. And I’m trying to keep the space of those portal links down to a minimum. The last thing I want is for the layout on the portal links to break too easily.
I expanded the layout of the lists and expanded the descriptions as a result. We’ll see how well that works.
And the reason I put “OpenGL Objects” rather than “Objects” there is because I wanted the name to more clearly indicate that it’s not about “objects-as-in-meshes” but “objects-as-in-data-structures”. I don’t want a new user to click it thinking it’s about meshes.
Add a portal for Miscellaneous stuff that’s currently under Other useful information.
Miscellaneous pages tend to work against the point of organized collections of information like portals. It’s just a grab-bag of stuff, and it doesn’t even have a category behind it. And much like the FAQ or Common Mistakes pages, it’s almost completely useless for learning anything. They’re nice to link to, but they’re not good organizational tools.
Or, more to the point, why would someone click on the Miscellaneous link? Besides simply to see what’s on the other side? Someone will click on “OpenGL Concepts” to find out what concepts are in OpenGL. They’ll click on “Rendering” to see how rendering works. And so forth. But “Miscellaneous?” That sounds like the link you click on when you’re bored.
Now, I wouldn’t mind a portal page for algorithms that are available on the Wiki. But the other thing I want to make sure of is that most of the forward-facing information (within 2 links of the main page) is actually good information. Things like these are just horribly out of date. I don’t think we want to show off stuff like that.
i don’t like huge space dedicated to “From the featured article” and “Did you know…”. those are extra panels for someone who got bored or something.
It’s modeled after Wikipedia. And I think it’s a pretty successful model for conveying useful information.
The featured article helps draw attention to good, solid, and complete articles on the Wiki. And the “Did you know” section allows us to put out brief factoids and warnings that might otherwise be missed. For example, a reminder that binding to GL_ARRAY_BUFFER doesn’t change what you render with would be something that I could see never leaving that section.
it had what most wiki-resources are lacking - easy to access expanded navigation, which helps you to see the structure of information. you’ve moved those to portal pages. it’s acceptable, but navigation on the main page is a bit lacking and you just have to do one more click to get to the same old navigation.
Look at the layout from the perspective of someone who has no idea what they’re doing. They know very little about OpenGL and probably graphics in general. Shoving 3 dozen links at them, each of them being little more than a couple of words that they don’t know what they mean is not a useful navigation system.
The portals are much better because they’re not just a link. They’re a brief description of what the main link is talking about. The OpenGL Concepts page is basically an abbreviated, annotated summary of all of OpenGL.
For someone who knows what they’re looking for, or even has an idea of what they’re looking for, the search box is far more useful than the links. When I wrote the “bunch of links” version of the main page, I thought I’d be using it a lot. But I didn’t; I just searched for the article(s) of interest. I even have a browser shortcut for Firefox’s awesome-bar that allows me to search the wiki at any time. It’s far more convenient than going to the main page.
Or to put it another way, the main page is for n00bs