The wiki army has recently completed a major undertaking to make the wiki look like Wikipedia. The basic idea is that most readers are familiar with Wikipedia. The closer we resemble Wikipedia, the easier it should be to navigate and use the wiki.
- All of the menus look like Wikipedia. For example, take a look at one of our recent articles: Investing in Japan The right sidebar and bottom menus look exactly like Wikipedia in layout and color. New is the small "V - T - E" at the bottom right (sidebar) and top left (bottom menu) which allow editors to View, look at the Discussion (Talk) page, end Edit the menus.
-The notices and warnings look like Wikipedia. These items flag the reader on important points, such as the blue "i" notice in Risk and return: application, or the orange "!" warning in Structured Products.
-A significant change was made in how the wiki's structure is viewed. Previously, the Table of Contents and all lists of articles were created and maintained by hand. This was a lot of work and we couldn't keep it up to date. With a new software "add-on," the article categories are automatically updated. What's that mean? Every time we edit an article, the listings follow. No more manual updates.
We took advantage of this new feature to create a category "tree" view, which is just like using Windows Explorer. Instead of folders and files, you are looking at categories and pages (articles). We implemented this feature everywhere we could.
--> Take a look: Help:Navigation Clicking on each category will open a drop-down list. There was a significant clean-up to get the category tree up-to-date. (We also renamed articles according to Wikipedia convention. Help pages start with "Help:" - we've rewritten a few of these pages as well. BTW, the search box was cleaned up.)
The left sidebar was overhauled to make the wiki easier to navigate.
- Wiki home - The wiki home page
- Browse site - The wiki navigation page
- Recent changes - What the wiki editors are working on. Check here for the latest.
- Random page - Want something to read? Click here.
- News and blogs - The Boglehead author's RSS feeds
- Glossary - Acronyms and abbreviations
"For wiki editors" - Similar to the investing "Start-up kits," we've created a Wiki Editor's Toolkit. It's everything you need to edit the wiki: Getting started - check the right sidebar. Like Wikipedia, we have a Sandbox for editors to practice.
I probably haven't described everything we did, but this is the general idea. Comments / questions / concerns are welcome.
