Hi,
I've been working on the wiki, following the plan I outlined
in my previous email, modifying the plan a bit as I went along. Here
is an update on the current state of the wiki.
Step 1) Identify user groups
Step 2) Define goal of Wiki
Step 3) Identify content categories
Step 4) Match content categories with user groups
Step 5) Impose category framework
All the above are done.
Step 6) Write and enforce Wiki Team policy guidelines.
Step 7) Implement maintenance tracking techniques.
Partially done. Step 7 can now be done via manual edits to pages. I
want to write a PHP-macro-script to automate it.
Step 8) Streamline Wiki navigation.
Mostly done? The new navigation framework can now be seen.
----
Some of the more significant changes I made to my plan as I did the
work:
Change 1) The Documentation category contained no pages. It was just
a master category for the Handbook, Howtos, Platforms and Reference
categories. I realized this did not make sense. So I merged the
Handbook category into the Documentation category. The Documentation
category now contains the documentation pages (formerly the Handbook
pages), plus the Howtos, Platforms and Reference sub-categories.
Change 2) I realized that Support would only be a single page and that
it should probably be in the Documentation category. This made the
Community category pretty meaningless. So I have deprecated the
Community category, and promoted the Discussions category to a top
level category. Blogs is a sub-category of Discussions. I'm not
totally happy with Discussions as a top level category, but I have yet
to discover something better.
Change 3) The category heirarchy is only implicit, not explicit. The
implicit heirarchy can be seen here:
http://gobo.kundor.org/wiki/Template:Category_Navigation
If the heirarchy were explicit (e.g. if Howtos were actually a
sub-category of Documentation), then a lot of space is wasted at the
top of the Category pages, as subcategories are listed first, and
their listing wastes gobs of screen space. This wasted space would
greatly reduces the usability of the category pages.
So, as result, there are two master categories: Approved Categories
and Deprecated Categories. All other categories should be a
descendant of one of these categories. I also made the aforementioned
Category Navigation template for quick navigation from category to
category.
Change 4) I added a News category for news items, just to see what it
would be like to try to replicate more of the functionality of the
web-site.
----
Here are links into the key pages in the "new" wiki:
http://gobo.kundor.org/wiki/Welcome_to_the_GoboLinux_Wiki%21
http://gobo.kundor.org/wiki/Documentation
http://gobo.kundor.org/wiki/Wiki_Team
It might also be worth taking a look at how you can navigate around
the categories:
http://gobo.kundor.org/wiki/Category:Documentation
Check out the Trash to see if you disagree with any of the pages that
I have marked for deletion:
http://gobo.kundor.org/wiki/Category:Trash
----
What's next? In no particular order:
Step 9) Finish guidelines and structure pages.
I need to finish these pages, and synchronize them with any policy
changes I have implemented, but not yet documented.
Step 10) Write/update templates for Todo & Question tracking.
I need to play with these and finalize how exactly I want them to
work. The goal for readers' questions to automatically trigger a
centralized notification mechanism. Similarly for todo items.
Step 11) About page
Write the "About" page. I'll wait to see what comments people have
about my "Welcome" page before I (or someone else) works on this more.
Step 12) Decide on Namespace usage.
MediaWiki has a lot of Namespaces. We'll be using primarily 4 of
them.
Main
Talk
Users
Users Talk
It might also be worth creating 'News' and 'News Talk' namespaces if
we decide to do news in the wiki at some point. (Is this technically
possible?)
Step 13) Create Custom MediaWiki Skin & Stylesheet
I think an improved skin will greatly increase the usability of the
Wiki by drastically reducing visual clutter. I have a lot of ideas.
I will not try to list them all here - it will be simpler for me to
create a template and then modify it based on feedback.
The one biggest change will be that I will "hide" or "remove from
(easy) view" all (or most) of the following links:
Article | Discussion | Edit | History | Protect | Delete | Move | Watch
Personal Tools
Navigation
Toolbox
* This page was last modified 20:19, 19 March 2007.
* This page has been accessed 22 times.
* Content is available under GNU General Public License License.
* Privacy policy
* About GoboLinux Knowledge Base
* Disclaimers
Heavily trafficed wiki pages will have a big column of page text on
the left, and a small column/box navigation aid in the upper right.
Similar to this page:
http://gobo.kundor.org/wiki/Wiki_Structure
(This will also be somewhat similar to the current design of the
GoboLinux web site.)
Step 14) Recruit a documentation category editor.
I'm hoping someone will volunteer to merge these 89 pages of
documentation...
http://gobo.kundor.org/wiki/Category:Documentation
... into the roughly 7 pages outlined here:
http://gobo.kundor.org/wiki/Documentation
(I know it looks like more than 7 pages, but the others are
categories.)
Step 15) Recruit category editors for other categories
Step 16) Resolve uneditable pages
There are some pages that I was not able to categorize via the
template system. When I appened the template and tried to save these
pages, the browser would time-out. I suspect a bug/infinite loop in
MediaWiki, but have not yet taken the time to track down the problem.
Step 17) Automate the review process with a PHP "macro" script.
Reviewing pages will then be an automated 2 click per page process.
----
As before, feedback is welcome. Thanks!
-mpb
_______________________________________________
gobolinux-devel mailing list
gobolinux-devel@lists.gobolinux.org
http://lists.gobolinux.org/mailman/listinfo/gobolinux-devel
