Information Architecture: Structure for non-namespaced content

[jdittrich]

The Mediawiki provides currently a teaching/university organization centered content-structure.

However, this shows only a part of the content and possibilities of our wiki. One possibility to give easier access content like how-tos, background information, student created leaning resources etc. would be to visibly link pages on an overview page showing main topics and pages belonging to them.

While search is for retrieving pages that are known and needed, such an overview is useful for discovering new content or recognizing a need for it.

Similar Structures elsewhere:

• Wikipedia Portals
• Webplatform Docs

Relevant Research: Cardsort and generated Categories

[jdittrich]

1. To get users started it is important that they know where to get and account and log in. It became a standard to directly provide a signup form on the startpage (facebook, tumblr) or at least a link like this (flickr)
2. Help for the most common sources of problems: inserting links or images
3. To maintain an archive of links to past semesters takes currently a lot of space. We should move those to "Past schedules". Quantitative Data supports this (practically no clicks on old schedules)
4. Students should be able to find content not only via the search function. Therefor we should provide consolidated collections of wiki-internal links. The structure is supported by cardsorts with several participants.