On Sat, 2009-03-07 at 18:30 +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote: [..] > > That could be interesting for Debian for DM/NM process. However the MOTU > > pages aren't usual homepage but an application form. > > Yet, they are in the homepage namespace…
A page name like "wiki.u.c/JohnDoe/UniverseContributorApplication" is almost a separate namespace (even though hierarchy is right to left). This is a usual problem of hierarchical layout, i.e what is the best page name: DebianInstaller/Team or Teams/DebianInstaller ? ;-) > > > Consider this an experiment that concerns the NM team. > > > > 1. homepage aren't application for template. > > 2. It would have been nice to ask on debian-www before hand (like > > you would RM, ftpmaster... on various situation) > > Well, the wiki is the wiki, it's a very liberal tool used for many > purposes and while I appreciate the work that you put into it, > [..] I dislike the fact that you want to control all the wiki pages. I know it's a problem I have (or I least I give that impression), and I am working on it. But every developer who grant commit access to a lot of contributors knows the feeling. When I got involved in the wiki, there was 3 different structure in the wiki (i.e Frontpages...). If I didn't refrain some people from adding their own structure, we would have 5 [incomplete] structures by now. > For me, it's important that users have something useful/nice to browse > when they start from the start page(s) but it's not a big deal if we have > lots of unrelated pages because debian members use the wiki for all kinds > of tasks. I don't think people browse pages, they just search them. Google knows what a good page is, google can figure out the ratio of good and bad pages on a site. As far as I know the higher the ratio, the higher google ranks each good page (which is sensible). Currently, you often have wiki.d.o pages in the top 5 pages: "wireless Debian", "webservers Debian", "lenny Debian", "debconf Debian", "hp Debian", "T400 Debian"... It wasn't the case 2 years ago. <offtopic> Unfortunately, "contribute Debian" isn't useful currently, but I hope it's going to change with the futur frontpage http://wiki.debian.org/FrontPageV3Sandbox </offtopic> > > > None of those reasons are very convincing. > > > > you mean that it isn't convincing to you. > > Let's review them: > * People should be invited to contribute to official documentations rather > that on the wiki > > What does that mean? You don't want help to maintain the wiki and we > should push people towards debian-doc. Looks weird… I mean that 99% of Debian's documentation is [and should remain] outside the wiki, but people tend to duplicate the documentation here. Maintaining the wiki is completely different from mere contribution. That's not a job for new comers. Of course, newcomers can review individual pages (i.e maintaining individual pages). Wiki contributors often want to make pages to explain how to install and use $foo. The problem is that installing $foo is explained in apt documentation, then one should read /usr/share/doc/$foo/README.*, then $foo's manpages and documentation. > * Limit spam > > Not putting content to avoid spam is a strange way to fight spam. I consider that people who create a wikihomepage to link to their homepage are actually spamming. > * Limit workload of maintaining the pages > > Homepages are maintained by their owner, not you. I wish it was 100% the case, but we probably handle 20 to 50% of the maintenance of those pages (fixing links). > * what if DebianWiki had 1 million user wiki home page ? > > That would be great because we would have 1 million contributors!!! ... and the [current] wiki search engine would be useless. But actually, I think it would be a great challenge/game to reach that figure (ok, you started to play already! ). > * the wikihomepage and regular wikipage share the same namespace > > Fortunately family names rarely collide with names that are interesting > for us. True, but not every one use their last name, and you can't imagine how people are creative. > > I didn't mention that the consequence of having a shared namespace, is > > that when you search in the wiki, results in homepages are listed too... > > I'm not sure that's bad but you may want to request a new feature upstream > to exclude some categories of pages by default… if you think that's this > behaviour is hurting the wiki. > > > Yes, this is a problem in the wiki engine we are using. > > Indeed. But MoinMoin is free software so we can enhance it. :) guess who is co-maintaining moinmoin package ;) > > > You can't expect everybody to have their own website. > > > > There are lots of ISP/associations/companies that offer > > website/homepage/blog hosting for free. I suppose we can expect > > contributors to be able to get one. > > Well, I don't agree with this. I'm not interested in having them lose time > to setup a website just to start contributing to Debian. bof > So I created a page for this game in my namespace and updated the rules so > that they should register there: > http://wiki.debian.org/RaphaelHertzog/NewContributorGame I was skeptical when I first that page name, but i actually find it pretty good. > I hope this is ok for you. I removed the homepages that were created for > this game. Thank you. > BTW, one of the contributors that joined started an esperanto translation > for the wiki… :) That's great. > On a more positive note, maybe you could point me to some documentation > for beginners that want to help with the wiki ? People should find quite some resource on how to contribute to the wiki on: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWiki Helping with the wiki's maintenance and administration is another story. > I'm blogging in French to > show how one can contribute to the various Debian teams > and I have nothing yet for the wiki team. :) No Teams/DebianWiki on wiki.d.o, that's so ironic ! (Especially since I mentioned that I love the Teams/* pages). I'll fix that, based on: * http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWiki/Contact#admins * http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWiki/Administration Regards, Franklin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
