Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-24006128-20200423160701/@comment-9605025-20200428184853

reply to #57 TableWiz wrote: [...]

Fandom permits personalization of wikis and some have used MediaWiki (now live on UPC Fandom) to add a top row that appears on article pages. [...] I don't quite understand how this would work. Could you link to an example? Or are you just referring to the local navigation menus? - reply to #58 Fandyllic wrote: Ummm.. that screenshot is from Gamepedia and not UCP... the Discussion link is just a link to the talk page with a different name.

[...] If I am not mistaken, I believe the point was to show us Fandom users the "Discussion" button that Gamepedia has. So it makes perfect sense it would be a Gamepedia wiki. - reply to #59 BowiQC wrote: Honestly, the new Dashboard link (you probably saw a pop-up about it) on Fandom/UCP made me happy, because it looks like Gamepedia. 😅 This is the exact issue I mentioned earlier. You dislike aspects of Fandom because it is different from Gamepedia and I dislike aspects of Gamepedia because it is different from Fandom. The underlying issue is that neither of us want to learn a new interface. However, that does not necessarily mean that one is better than the other.

As for the "Dashboard", that is currently just an experimental script. It has not yet been rolled out Fandom-wide. I get that you like it because it is Gamepedia-like but it is not such a big deal from my perspective.

 The dashboard provides 6 links. 2 of those links link to the same page, just different tabs on the page. So let's consider it 5 links.

Of those 5 links, 1 is to the local user page which is already available via the same drop-down the dashboard is accessed from. Another is to user preferences which is removed from the drop-down and added to the dashboard submenu when the dashboard is inserted. So, as far as I am concerned, those 2 links don't count as the dashboard actually adds to the number of clicks require to get there.

Of the remaining 3 links, the first one does the same thing as clicking the "edit" button in the user masthead on the userpage. In the sens that you can now do this from a dashboard, I guess you could argue this "centralized" option is "better". However, the masthead is available via the user page and several other pages. So in terms of saving clicks, this really doesn't do much.

Thus we are left with 2 links on the dashboard and 2 links is the dashboard submenu. These 4 links are the only ones that, in my opinion, have added any value. Even then, a reasonably experienced user would already know how to access these pages without the new dashboard. The "My Contributions" item in the dashboard submenu saves only 1 click. So, in my opinion, its added value is extremely low.