User blog comment:KyleH/Fall 2009 Update/@comment-20644-20091203083457

I’m glad to see you guys are looking into a new design for the home page. I’ve always felt that it was really disconnected from the rest of Central. I mean, there’s not even a link to the Central recent changes. While it is your corporate home page, it should also connect to the rest of the Central wiki. It’d make things much easier to navigate.

One question - why the cross-wiki search? Seems like a good idea and all, but I’m not sure I see the relevance of searching “Edward Cullen” on Wookieepedia.

In making Central more focused on communities, which is a great idea, one thing I’d like to see is all community team members and Central users put more of an emphasis on being helpful instead of just telling people to go to Special:Contact. Yes, they should go there, and I’m sure it does get annoying after awhile seeing requests on your talk pages that should be going to Special:Contact, but as active users and as community team members people need to recognize that it’s going to happen.

Now there’s no real issue in telling people to go to Special:Contact because it’s likely to get a faster response. Sometimes I, and others I’ve talked to about this since I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just me, feel that users are being given the impression that their requests are being brushed off and they’re being told to send it somewhere else so that user or community team member doesn’t have to deal with it. Now don’t get me wrong, I know that’s not the intention, but intentions don’t mean anything if the wrong impression is being sent.

I’m not honestly sure how to change that, though. One thing that might be more helpful is if instead of saying “Go to Special:Contact and it’ll be taken care of there” or whatever, users or team members could put a more happy, welcoming, and helpful spin on it. Something like: “Hey! Thanks for your request. I’d be happy to take care of it for you, but it may take me awhile. If you want it to be taken care of faster, feel free to send a message over Special:Contact and one of our team members will get to it ASAP. Thanks!”

That goes a long way. =)

P.S. This doesn’t apply to the majority of people who tell others to go to Special:Contact, as most people are pretty good about it. There’s just a few people I think need to work on it. It’d make a tremendous difference.