There is three category of people new comers, user and contributors.
About the new comers : we are competing to get their attention and time.
We need to be very good at it because Axiom is complex so it is not going to be an easy sell.
For them it should be the principle of minimum surprise and maximum simplicity. ( Next is a description of me looking at a project I might use, therefore interpret the "I want" has I really expect to see)
If their is two column I will only read the left one. (When we discuss the web page with Ralf today I even had forgotten about the right one I remember only the logo and was surprise to see link.) Also I expect the "This site" to be on the top right corner.
Our current top of the page do not make any sense, it is pure confusion to me.
Also the left menu is too long, and redundant : Audio/visual audio ??? not common confusing.
Press releases I have doubt the general press is going to be interested by us really soon. Gold Silver , the Olympics maybe ?
What I like is a News section where I can see that a project is alive.
( Also I like a related project link where I can see other CAS, I love it, I think it is fair play)
I want a "Description" two page long maximum with what is Axiom what is special and great about it.
I want a screen shoot , yes sorry I always want a screen shoot even for a cmd line programs. And then I want a Download with maybe some binary but for sure a tgz of the source. I will grab it, type ./configure, make, make install and try.
Then I am going to look for a good introduction. And I hate it when people give me choice I want the one and definitive introduction. I will read between 5 and 20 pages max. Any document that go over 100 pages will scare me to death. A good indicator for me is if I feel ok to print it.
And if I survive I will look for more advanced material.
For the axiom user. We should not expect him to subscribe to the mailing list. He will go to the web page to solve his problems and get new version.
Here it is good FAQ, oriented tutorial, documentation and search able mail list. Subscribing to a mailing list is a big step, we should not expect people to do it.
For active user/ contributors/ developer what is needed is a collaboration tool, I have no answer for that.
Personally I find the wiki difficult to use, it seem a big mess to me and I spend a lot of time looking for documents I saw before and know should be somewhere. It lack structure and search will not replace that, in general giving a name to your problem is the difficult part.
When you look at the tree structure you see a big mess and all the bugs !
About people contribution : I almost never find wiki useful. Wiki as documentation is always an unpleasant mess. I found comments useful( I think it is the MySQL documentation, it has user comments at the end of each section, you always find clarification and corner case described).
And modifying a page is not has easy at it sound. Writing correctly is time consuming and difficult. I never feel like touching other people stuff. You can often see it in a wiki where old information is rarely deleted.
So in the end it is a question of balance between people contribution and time saved not doing it against mess and quality.
I think a fix web page with a few editors and keeping the wiki as a play ground is the best solution. But easy to say because I am not volunteering to be an editor.
Also just doing a good cleaning of the wiki might be what we need.