I have only been using this site for a few months now since getting my N900 but the one thing that strikes me is that there is no quick way to the Wiki.

Could i suggest adding 'Wiki' button in between Community and Development for the maemo banner?

It was discussed at length during the planning phase of the redesign and again during the implementation.

Basically, the idea is to have subjects in the navigation bar, not tools.

...and every subject should provide the appropriate entry points to the wiki.

Ahh i call foul on the subjects, because there is a Talk link

Not sure if this will rehash old ground but my thoughts are that the Community is rather broad subject but Wiki (or Documentation subject) is a subject in its own right.
For new people visiting this site the documentation should be their first port of call and also reduce the excessive posting in the forum on topics covered in the wiki.
I would say that even novice users upon seeing a link to the wiki would associate it with a knowledge base due to Wikipedia popularity.

I'm with Cas07. One of the constant complaints that 'people don't read the wiki' might be reduced if there were a nice, clear link to it on that task-bar. Call it 'knowledge base', documents' whatever - but put some sort of direct link up there.

Especially since 'community' on the top bar takes me to the front ot the maemo.org community section, whereas 'community' on the sidebar takes me to the t.m.o. community. Since I'd expect 'community' to mean the same thing in both placs, I might never click the 'community' tab until after I have been bawled out for not using the wiki.

Talk was integrated later on. Besides, there would've been riots in the streets if it hadn't been included in the top-level navigation.

Users landing on the front page have a "Get help" link over in the sidebar, developers landing on the front page have the development link in the top bar. Most everybody else is landing here through Google searches.

This argument has been rehashed at least 3 or 4 times.

And you don't think the changes in the demographic of t.m.o. in recent months make it worth having a fresh look?

I'm sorry but I am going to have to completely disagree with the outcomes of previous arguments, it is not common sense web design. As RevdKathy stated the demographic has changed radically in the last few months and change is needed to keep up.
Ill outline some of the points that i have noticed, most of which can be dealt with easily with a simply page update as i understand more fundamental changes require time.

A case in point about general users is a post by qgil explaining that people who like forums, rarely venture away to go exploring for more information, be that news or documentation.

I did some research on the pages you mention and this is what i found:

maemo.org/support

• There are two links called Tutorial and FAQ but no other links to Documentation or the main Wiki page.
• You are advertising Nokia forum links before any of the sites own links, from my point of view it seems odd as you are taking users away from this site.
• Side issue: There is a link to a talk forum that is not this sites official forum.
  Edit: Didn't realise it is actually this forum but still confusing to point to an external site main page rather than directly here.

maemo.org/community

• The is a link the wiki but it is so understated it too me 5 visits to the page initially to even notice it. Obviously i did notice the wiki recent changes panel but i was expecting to see a prominent main page link.

maemo.org/talk

• There is a reference to the wiki in a 'Read First' topic in the N900 forum only, realistically there should be a forum wide topic or some other method.
• Make the moderators aware of the wiki and get them to actively promote pages that are applicable.
• Further to this encourage the first poster of a topic to update with any useful finding from ensuing discussion.

http://wiki.maemo.org/

• This maybe something only i am looking for but the addition of a link to the wiki Categories in the navigation sidebar
• The inclusions of breadcrumbs would be a possible help too

That may be so however my first experience of using this is that in order to find the Wiki rather than simply navigating the site, going back to Google was an easier way to find it, until Firefox kept it in its address bar history. So i can bet that if you ask basic users on this site to find the wiki main page they would struggle. Imho that is bad web design relying on an external search engine for main site links.

I certainly think the work by everyone, especially the developers, involved with maemo is fantastic and I apologise if my reply is curt but I am simply frustrated that there is a lack of clear guidance for end users on such a large, now prominent, site.

N.B. I visited Ubuntu sites from the main page, imagining I was a first time user and their support page, i hadn't seen it before, is exactly the inspiration that i would use if i were to create such a page.

btw a related Brainstorm proposal exists even if it's missing the basic quality (no solutions listed, no link to a discussion thread): http://maemo.org/community/brainstor..._of_maemo-org/

Either we consider this the discussion thread of the Brainstorm proposal or either we dismiss the brainstorm proposal and discuss only here. A brainstorm process to discuss whether we put one link or not to the website navigation looks like too complicated.

so in the rehash, what was the deciding reason that it was a bad idea to make the wiki more visible? what detrimental effects were there expected by making info like the wiki more easy to find? I can understand that there is some reasoning on why they were done that way before, but 'Talk' didn't fit into that reasoning, but it was added because it was useful to do so.

Forums can get link rot very quickly, and searching through thousands of pages to find the latest info can get tiresome so people just get lazy and start new threads. In the wiki there should be only one place for the info ( and under the covers, history and old versions as info changes), and we can take advantage of linking several things together in an easy to find (and read) format.

Lots of people may be using the forums and threads to hold info because they're not aware of an alternative. Things like lists, FAQs, etc I think would be best handled if they were not in a threaded format, often peppered with additional discussion posts that do not provide useful info.

Thoughts?