Regarding front page

Serendove, I don't really find that to be a compelling argument. Even if you don't know what to search for, you likely do know what category your super cool thing falls under. You aren't going to look under the map section for a super cool looking skill. It's rarely going to be a truly random click sequence. By far the most used links on the front page are the missions, patch page, and events. Having so many deep links is information overload and I kind of doubt that many people are willing to filter through all of that.

Also, people who want to see change are free to mock their changes up like with any other big change.

I didn't say you look up skills under the map section, you look up skills under the skill section? which is included in my list of helpful tabs. Also nowhere on the wiki you get a complete list of all areas inside the game. Which I find is useful for newbies who want to look for new areas to explore. If you remove all those information, or at least make them harder to find, in my opinion it hinders the ability for new players to explore the game efficiently.

The game itself doesn't have a efficient guide to new players, which is why, at least to my understanding, this wiki exits. I'm not saying the front page is perfect, it could use reformatting, but I don't think it's a big improvement to remove the information there.

I do agree the skills section is a bit excessive though, I wouldn't mind just keeping the categories.

Categories would be fine for me. It would be better than seeing fighter skills then underneath it is puppetry...and so on. just a jumbled mess :x

My example was simply pointing out that one does not/should not have to "randomly click" through pages to find information. You should basically always know the category of what you're looking for, so category links should be enough. If the wiki doesn't have a list of all areas in the game, that's a shortcoming of the wiki and needs to be fixed, but I don't consider that a strong argument for verbose front page navigation.

The wiki isn't really a guide to the game either, it's more of an encyclopedia/reference. In my opinion, there are clear examples that run counter to being newbie-friendly because of verbosity. Enchants were mentioned elsewhere in this thread. If a player is new to the game, how is having all rank enchants on the navigation useful? To further my point, the top enchantment rank link from the home page in the past ~2 months is Rank A. That link was clicked 177 times. Of all of the link referrals outbound from the home page, that one was clicked 0.03% of the time. Multiply that by 14 to cover all ranks (an optimistic estimate) and it's still a whopping 0.5% of all link clicks. Statistically speaking, it's not useful. I can look at more stats later if you want, but trust me when I say the lion's share of links leaving from the home page are due to recency, not the comprehensive index on the front page. The main reason the navigation section is used is for skills that are recently released, as far as I can tell.

So I guess one idea is to start collapsing the navigation to categories where we see fit, and add a new category for "recent/relevant (to the latest release(s)) articles". I don't know what the right granularity of that would be, though.

Personally I prefer information accessable from the start. I wouldn't want to search into subsection areas (e.g. categories) to find what I need, because that would take some time to load and I don't like my time wasted (even if its just a flimsy second).

Yes, I do use the search function, but that doesn't mean everyone else will.

I didn't mention enchants but enchanting is not a very popular path for most people, so I understand why it has low click rate. But instead of comparing the amount of clicks to the total amount of clicks on the homepage, it should be compared to the total amount of clicks on the Rank A page during those 2 months, to give an idea of how many people in total actually visited that page in the first place.

That is beside my point though. I won't argue back and forth on this thread because you asked for my opinion and that was my opinion.

I will give one last example: I played in the Taiwan server when Iria came out, there was a wiki for it as well, but didn't have the info readily available on the first page. I went through a 2 months oblivious to the existence of the generation quests. I got bored very quickly and quit the game. I started after in the NA server and got into the Generation story lines and that's what kept me in the game. Looking back it would've helped me a lot if I had that info presented clearly in an index. I still see a lot of newbies leave the game because it get's too complicated and there's too much stuff to learn, they don't know whether a quest is just a quest or it's part of something else. Having the info readily available puts things into perspective, because how can you search for something when you don't even realize that it exists?

Whether if it's an intended function or not, this wiki is used by a lot of newbies as a guide, and I don't think that is a bad thing. Because after all this is a wiki for a game, and I hardly think the importance of it being encyclopedia worthy surpasses user friendliness... This wiki is more guide than encyclopedia from the way I see it anyways. For example, all skill pages have training tip sections. When you look up Carpentry in Encyclopedia Britannica does it give you tips on what type of axe to use and how to hold it?...You find that info in a Carpentry guide... All skills give comprehensive training data for each rank. When you look up Schools in Encyclopedia Britannica, does it give you all the classes it offers and all the credits you need to graduate etc?...You find that in a guide for students also... That's just two examples =/

I don't mind arguing back and forth on opinion if it helps me understand other standpoints. I'm making an effort to try and convince people of my views because I don't want to put much effort into ideas that are unpopular. Though, I dislike having extended conversations on wiki threads.

Even though enchanting is not a popular skill line, using enchantments is not, so I don't really think that's the total explanation behind the low clicks (also, 15712 visits to the Rank A page in the same period which means 1.1% clicked from the front page). The argument I'm trying to make here is the same argument I will make in response to your last example. You make a strong case (in this particular case) for making users aware of the presence of generational content on the wiki. That makes total sense, and I'm not disagreeing with that. My question is, why does that mean that every single generation needs a link on the front page? If a user isn't aware of generation quests, it seems highly unlikely to me that the user will be looking to click into the G17 article. Instead, they will think, "what's generation quests?" and click on a link that talks about them as a whole (and also links to the individual generations). So what I'm saying is, the additional level of detail is not helping new users. The same argument can be applied for enchants. I am not arguing that the entire navigation should be discarded, I'm simply saying that I believe it is way too fine-grained.