Hi Villiam,

Thanks again. We really appreciate the detailed comment.

I discussed your comment with Vipul, but didn't have a chance to run the final version of my response by him.

(Unless you want to change your mission to "develop an improved version of Anki or Beeminder". But you don't have the resources to do both, even if you had experience and ideas.)

Vipul was making the general point that to date we've been focused on content, partially out of virtue of lacking technical skills, and that it could be more socially valuable create a platform. We don't have concrete ideas for what sort of platform we would make (in particular, we're not thinking of trying to make an improved version of Anki or Beeminder specifically). If we were to do this, it would constitute a significant shift in mission.

I say this because it feels to me like you are not fully commited to the tools you have, and therefore you don't use them fully. For example, if you knew for sure that you are going to stay with MediaWiki, you would probably put more care into improving the wiki navigation. (But maybe you feel like "meh, this is just some temporary tool, we will use something better later", and then improving the details feels like a waste of time, if you expect it to change later.)

Until very recently, we were thinking in terms of the wiki (once fleshed out) being our core offering. I agree that our wiki navigation has much room for improvement – we were more focused on content creation, outreach and fundraising. Now that we're shifting to maintenance mode, improving the wiki's navigation is higher priority. However, we expect that people will find our pages through searching for a particular topic via Google more than through the portal.

Seems to me that your current wiki structure uses too much introductions, too much redirection.

Until a month ago or so, we had most of our pages linked to from the front page. It was starting to seem too cluttered, so we switched to a more modular design. Now that we've decided not to produce a lot of pages in the near future, it may be better to switch back, or adopt some compromise.