User:The Transhumanist/Sandbox102

Main page redesign project
Up until March 17, 2006, Wikipedia's Main page's design looked like this. Here's a view of the design with historical content, on the Wayback Machine.

In October of 2005, User:Tom- decided to redesign Wikipedia's Main page, and began developing a draft. He led 2 rounds of development that month, but then ran out of free time. The project went dormant for a couple months, and then I picked up where Tom had left off...


 * While I spearheaded the project, I frequently updated the notices about the project on the Main Page's talk page's header. To make sure the announcements were noticed, I made a point to change their content as well as their colors.
 * 04:57, 27 December 2005 – Announce new Main page redesign draft (Draft 3)
 * 17:15, 7 January 2006 – Notice of Draft 4
 * 22:13, 8 January 2006 – Notice of Draft 5 (Round 5)
 * 02:01, 16 January 2006 – Notice of Round 5 open-editing session
 * 19:58, 19 January 2006 – Notice of upcoming Draft 6
 * 13:09, 21 January 2006 – Notice of voting session for Round 6
 * 19:24, 22 January 2006 – Notice for voting to select amongst Main page drafts.
 * 12:30, 25 January 2006 – Notice extending community consultation period on the competing drafts
 * 02:04, 29 January 2006 – 12 redesigns in Round 6
 * 01:10, 19 March 2006 Notice of voting session over, link to results

Basic topics lists grow out of control
Wikipedia doesn't have any mechanisms or protocols for maintaining articles at a particular scope. All articles are subject to additions all the time.

So the basic topics lists kept growing until they were no longer basic.

And being supported by a WikiProject, unlike the "Lists of topics" (which had no such support), they started surpassing those lists in scope. They were becoming more comprehensive than the lists that were intended to be comprehensive!

This was a big problem.

It was time to redefine the project and find a solution fast...

General topics lists schism
So I looked into the possibility of renaming them to "List of x topics", to combine the set with their "more comprehensive" cousins. But I came across an even bigger problem.

Two types of articles shared the name "List of x topics". About half of them were structured lists, but the other half were alphabetical.

The solution?

Rename them to "outlines" and "indexes".

What's next?
Outliner feature integration.