Re: [directory-discuss] 'Bait and surrender'

[Svetlana Tkachenko]

Hi Ian,

Ian Kelling wrote:
>  [...]
> You wrote, "should not have any gateways to proprietary at all in any
> form whatsoever", and gave an example of linking to one site, which
> somewhere on it includes a bad links, but this is not what the free
> software distribution guidelines say, and it would not be practical. The
> free software distribution guidelines says "it must take care not to
> recommend nonfree software." Icecat prominently includes links to
> wikipedia and duckduckgo, and people use those to find software, and
> they include tons of links to nonfree software, and I'm sure wikipedia
> links are included in other parts of free software distros too. 

Wow yes.

> It
> doesn't make them non-free. We can't blindly say that because somewhere
> in a domain there are links to proprietary software, we won't link to
> it. 

It is my opinion that we need to have a catalogue of free website
resources (with freely licensed content, with free software on it) and
edit GNU IceCat to warn the users who visit a website whose licence and
lack of proprietary software are unknown. HTML markup has licence tags
and attributes which could facilitate this task.

Ian Kelling wrote:
> [...] Specifically, increasing the quality and
> comprehensiveness of our articles and the number of contributors should
> be our primary focus. Ask, "how often does fsd get used when someone
> tries to find some new free software for some task", I think it's
> probably a low single digit percentage. 

This is true - there are some things which would be helpful:

A) not using the default mediawiki skin
- having large 'edit', 'add entry', 'leave a message' buttons at the top
prominently - worded in clear verbs, the current tab names are confusing
and some of them are redundant and some are missing
- having a 100% wide search bar across the page top

B) having a proper list of categories and selectors in the sidebar when
looking at the search results - I do not know how to do this, sorry! We
could ask for help here:
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-user

C) having a simple version of the new entry form, without the advanced
fields

Ian Kelling wrote:
> Most people try searching
> package descriptions in their gnu/linux repos and using web search
> engines, and search engines don't link to the fsd very much.

I wonder why. I checked SEO guidelines.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Search_engine_optimization_extensions
may be interesting.

1. FSF Directory does not have META description tags.
2. FSF Directory's mobile friendliness is poor. I would suggest
installing https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Refreshed (or surfing
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_skins for other options),
altering it to make the search box bigger, and making it show the needed
buttons across page top.
3. FSF Directory takes 8 seconds to load.
4. We seem to have Piwik on the site, but we're not watching its output.

Svetlana.