Explore Sandbox

A place for experimenting with the "Explore" sidebar on the front page.

My original clustering of topics by broad subject is apparently falling apart on the front page. While in my original revamp there were a few things that were more "gag" pages (like cows, hot sauce, meat market), there's stuff that should be sub-topic-of-a-subtopic stuff popping up on the main explore page: barber shops, nimby, ... maybe there should be a page that organizes davis philosophical-political issues, a page for services (like barber shops), and a page for religion (so you can put places of worship, religions, whatever),.. just a thought. Maybe we should have an organization party so we can bring more quality content closer to the top level... some things are not as well placed as they should be. -jr

It needs rennovation. Outgoing Links should be taken into account," and just because something is important doesn't mean it needs to be in Explore. We should try to categorize things?
Okay: We need to stop throwing random pages into Explore, really, please. please. again, please. I know your page is really important. But if you just made it, and if it contains less than, say, 20 links, then please don't add it to explore. We need to work together and refactor explore so that it's actually useful to people. Right now I think it's just a scattered group of a ton of pages. Some are good, some are bad (link-wise, is what I mean). I understand that sometimes it's hard to find a place for a page to be linked from, but we need to start thinking before we throw things there. We should strive to re-organized Explore based on items from Site Organization. Important pages (not based on content or our personal opinon of important) ought to go into explore, and it shouldn't have 80+ links — that's just useless (especially because of the thin+long layout of the explore page as it sits on the Front Page). Discuss any organizational ideas on this page. JamieRaba did a really good job of coming up with Explore many months ago, but the site has outgrown his "hey look, cool stuff" approach? —PhilipNeustrom

My thoughts exactly. When a site exists at the scale that DavisWiki does, I think you can't put all the pages up. And even pages that have 5 links can just be a bit circular, in that they refer all to each other. I think there is ONE way you could have a well-structured model that also emphasizes cool stuff. Check out the OLD yahoo layout: http://web.archive.org/web/19970330043815/http://www11.yahoo.com/ .. Where the MAJOR categories are the focal structure, but then there are selected sub-categories listed. That can work pretty well. -jr

I am observeing that most of the edits are lately to businesses/restaurants, political pages, student groups, and personal pages. And if you look at the crown jewels of this site, they focus around those ideas. But edits don't matter as much as page usage. Do you have any usage stats, phil? -jr

This is for some particular month and only that month. Hense it is particularly biased information and might be largely useless..):

People
Events Board
Friends Urging Campus Kindness
Sword and Sandals
Senate Candidates
Budget Hearing Scandal
Student Focus
Housing Guide
Davis Map
Senate
Apartments
ASUCD Open Government
Frog Signs
Good Ideas For Dates

And here is a list of the most common search keywords(external search engines)

davis
wiki
apartments
ca
daviswiki
davis411
bistro
california
ciocolat
phleger
naum
crepeville
apartment
uc
restaurants
allegre
pizza
thai
pepperwood
restaurant
temescal

Finally, here is a list of the most common(case-insensitive) search queries for the Davis Wiki search bar:

    178 Senate
    164 FUCK
    113 Wanted
    108 Rob Roy
    102 Test
     86 Wanted Pages
     77 ASUCD
     70 apartments
     59 housing
     58 California Aggie
     54 Ben
     53 LEAD
     53 Crepeville
     52 Restaurants
     50 Alcohol
     48 KDVS
     46 SUshi
     46 STUDENT FOCUS
     46 Katy Tang
     46 GASC
     45 User
     43 Cafe Roma
     42 TO DO
     42 RANDOM
     42 Bike
     41 Ben Duax
     41 Aggie

That should give a fairly good idea of what people look for on the site.

Step 1

Lets find the most important (structually) pages. Then lets organized them. Let's make sure all pages in the current Explore have links from at least 5 other pages. (Click on the page's title to do a search for the title string)

Ken, James — I put Spiritual Organizations inside of Organizations instead of Explore. If I were looking for a religious place I would look at Organizations? I think we might need a massive rehaul of Explore come the creation of UC Davis, Davis and a few more general pages. My concern is that while a catalog of churches is useful, there's a lot w/o pages right now and the few that do have very little outgoing links. I think the page ought to be in Explore in a bit, but maybe not right now. - PhilipNeustrom

Can we add Hotels to this? — KenBloom

I think the wiki should strive to be the best resource for folks in davis, not nec. a tourism thing. Maybe we can collect tourist/visiting things into a page and throw it on explore. Besides, that Hotels page has only one new outgoing link right now.

Can you think of anything else tourist-related (besides Hotels)? And the Hotels page will presumably get edited and filled in with links. Part of the reason for this page is to make people notice. (And of course I'll add some infos) — KenBloom

Previous Version

Events Board and Regular Events

Davis Life

City of Davis (Map)

Downtown, Central, North, East, South Davis, Outskirts
Apartments, Cooperative Housing, and Residences
Transportation, Parks, Town Art, Town History
Social Services
Weather

UC Davis

Food and Drink

WiFi Hot Spots, Public Internet Terminals, Linux Users

Attempt #3

questions/concerns: I think LSA, GSA should be on Explore, but as of now they don't link to much. They're both fantastic or soon to be fantastic, but I think they should link to a great deal of pages (if possible), because Explore is supposed to be a starting point. I'd help out but I don't know anything about either organization :) Even links to sort of silly things would be good, because it's likely that a law student or a graduate student would first click on GSA or LSA, seeing it there. - PhilipNeustrom

Events Board and Regular Events

Davis Life

City of Davis (Map)

Downtown, Central, North, East, South Davis, Outskirts
Apartments, Cooperative Housing, and Residences
Parks, Town Art, Town History

UC Davis

Food and Drink

WiFi Hot Spots, Public Internet Terminals, Linux Users

Attempt #2

IN PROGRESS (Any ideas?)

Events Board and Regular Events
City of Davis (Map)

Davis areas: Downtown, Central, North, East, South Davis, Outskirts
Apartments, Cooperative Housing, and Residences
Parks and Town Art

Campus (click for more)

Campus Buildings, Dorms
Colleges, Professional Schools
Student Organizations, Underground Societies
Spots And Places and Campus Art

Davis Life

Night Time, Music Scene, Davis Wish List
Social Structures, Member Pages
Shopping, Living Cheaply, Discounts and Freebies,
Payphone Project, Bicycles, Cows, Hot Sauce
Meat Lab, Meat Market

Food and Drink

Internet

WiFi Hot Spots and Public Internet Terminals
Useful sites?: DavisCoeds (or maybe put this inside of "Internet"?)

I think that this is a good start, but there seems to be the problem of wanting to just throw in a page that's good just because it's good — not because it's really in the right spot. I'd say our reorganization of Explore needs to wait for probably 50 or so more pages in the wiki. Right now, I'm going to spend my time instead making sure all our pages are linked up well and organized in a general->less general->specific->more specific manner. I.E. we have Frat Parties, free beer, but no Parties and Drinking pages. Just my 0.02 - PhilipNeustrom

I totally agree. But, I also think that people who would love the site if they clicked on the right pages might give up on the site when it seems completely geared towards each section of town. I actually didn't necessarily choose the BEST pages to put in there, but just ones that linked to lots of other ones, or were at least exciting. I know they're sometimes "sub-classes", but I figure as far as utility goes, I think it would get people more excited about the site. Sometimes, I think the less exploratory indivual gives up one daviswiki when it just seems like another Davis411, which perhaps the "breakdown by city area" might suggest to the unitiated. The page of the day does a lot to despell that notion, but the explore setup does not at all reflect where the dominant amount of content is. Is there any way to see what the most content-heavy pages are right now, just out of curiosity? - jr

Jaime, we took your general layout from attempt #2, beefed it up a touch, and moved things around so as to focus on more interesting pages first. Thanks a ton for your work and suggestions, it made it so much easier. - MikeIvanov

Attempt #1

Davis Life

Davis Places

Restaurants, Cafes, and Bars
WiFi Hot Spots and Public Internet Terminals
Apartments, Cooperative Housing, and Residences
Parks and Town Art
Campus (click for more)

Campus Buildings and Dorms
Colleges and Professional Schools
Student Organizations and Underground Societies
Spots And Places and Campus Art

City of Davis (Map)

Davis areas: Downtown, Central, North, East, South, West, and the Outskirts
Town History and UC Davis History

Davis People

Social Structures and DavisWiki Member Pages

Davis Things

Payphones, Bicycles, Cows, and Hot Sauce
Anime

Purging of Version dated 5/23/05

Events Board, Regular Events

Davis Life

City of Davis (Map)

Downtown, Central, North, East, South Davis, Outskirts, Greenbelts
Apartments, Cooperative Housing, Housing Guide, and Residences
Parks, Town Art, Town History
Shopping Centers
Social Services, Medical Services

UC Davis

Food and Drink

9/30/05 Version

Events Board, Regular Events

Davis Orientation

City Life

UC Davis

Computer and Internet

Anyone else interested in fixing Explore? IMO, it is way too bloated. Stuff like Cows, KDVS, and Photography, while interesting, aren't things people really need to see on the front page. — AndrewChen

Events Board, Regular Events