I agree with the spirit of what Ted's saying (we need to stick to an
organizational plan), but that's a static problem - we also have a
dynamic problem, and that's that there's a lot of out-of-date chaff on
the wikis that hamper any attempts to find the wheat. (It's been pointed
out before that the built-in wiki search is useless - Google is
marginally better, mostly because it's faster; there's still way too
many useless results.
Case in point: I wrote a dev-list message this morning about our checkin
process; while writing, I looked for documentation of our process, and
found out-of-date pages by Michael Toy and Ducky long before I found the
"current" info.
This problem won't be solved without a wiki gardener; even if we get rid
of half the chaff now (a huge effort), we'll still be having this same
discussion again in a year or so. See previous wiki redesign announcements:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.osaf.devel/1205/match=wiki
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.osaf.devel/739/match=wiki
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.osaf.design/2988/match=wiki
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.osaf.devel/3188/match=wiki
...
...Bryan
Ted Leung wrote:
In my view, the single biggest problem that we are facing is the
actual organization of the content on the wiki(s). That's the
problem that Mimi and I were trying to solve with the information
hierarchy that was previously developed on this list:
<http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/WikiReTaxonomy>.
Lots of people's input was incorporated into that taxonomy. No
matter which wiki software we use or which features it has, we are
still going to be bumping up against this problem. Every day we see
questions about where to find some piece of information that was
previously recorded in the wiki. As far as I can tell, the only
people who seem to be efficient at using the wiki are people who go to
the same (small) set of pages over and over, or people (like me) who
have a customized list of entry points
<http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/TedLeung20060824> to
useful pages.
Ted
On Sep 18, 2006, at 10:09 AM, Priscilla Chung wrote:
We're trying to kick start the wiki project again. First I'd like to
ask everyone to answer the following:
+ What features do people like about the current wiki?
+ What features are missing from the current wiki?
Here are my examples. Please copy and paste in your answers:
+ What features do people like about the current wiki?
1. The page loading are fairly quickâI use checkpoint a lot.
2. The editor is simple. Easy to use, easy to find. As long as you're
not doing anything to complicated.
3. Finding the Cosmo project page (which is the pages I'm in the
most) is on the left nav and fairly easy to find.
+ What features are missing from the current wiki?
1. Information hierarchy problem and I cannot locate pages directly
when I need them.
2. If you want to do something a bit more complicated in the WYSIWYG
editor, it starts to act funny. ie. adding tables.
3. A better search engine. Difficulty finding pages. Maybe because
there is an OSAF site, OSAF blog, wiki, bugzilla and addition HTML
pages for specs??
-Priscilla
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "General" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/general
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "General" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/general
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "General" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/general
