Martin Lasarsch wrote: > Hi > > I still have this on my todo list ... I post it here to hear your opinions, > and because we have only the SDB namespace atm. > > Did i miss something? To be honest i thought it would be much more, but i > don't know what else to write :-)
very good idea to discuss this, I think ATM our wiki needs some formating guidelines (over what has already be done) > > --- > Howto/SDB/FAQ? > There is some confusion about the definition of howtos, SDB articles and > FAQs. > This page tries to explain the main differences between the different styles > to write documentation. > > Why a different namespace for them > Working with namespaces makes searching much easier and you can see on the > first look what it is. I think it's a bad idea. namespaces are short in number, difficult to deal with (needs an admin change to config files) and not done for this. much better is the use of categories and sub-categories, pages and sub-pages. don't make a mistake - I'm not a mediawiki guru and discovered this only fiew days ago :-), I've still much to learn :-) the start is from: http://fr.opensuse.org/Special:Uncategorizedcategories (replace fr by en if you want, but I experimented on fr wiki) this links you the the first level categories. clicking on one of them send you to the sub-categories of this one, and so on. three or four levels are the best. see mediawiki help for details. When the layout bug will be fixed, this should be much fancier, now you have to scroll down to see the links :-(. > > The different types > > howto > From the wikipedia definition "A how-to is an informal, often short, > description of how to accomplish some specific task. They are generally meant > to help non-experts, and may leave out details that are only important to > experts, and may be greatly simplified from an overall discussion of the > topic." > This describes perfectly an SDB article :-) no. look at the "informal". SDB articles are very formal and should stay like this, it's a very good thing. > Anyhow, most howtos are much more for experts and often more verbose. true for the verbose part :-) (and I was a linuxdoc HOWTO writer :-) I think of some particular sorts of pages: * SDB is really a special kind, that could need a special maintenance team, because they are intimidating at first (the "formal" aspect, the SDB HOWTO IS intimidating :-) * usual pages. one subject=one page, formalised as the writer needs * Longer pages. When a page is more than two screen hight (approx), it's better to split the page. These are HOWTO and the howto index page can be like this: http://fr.opensuse.org/Comment_faire or that one http://fr.opensuse.org/Comment_faire/Mini_manuels this sub page makes it easy to see that the pages are related, it's also easier to categories them (may be making only the main page in a category, I dn't know for sure, I'm experimenting) * tips and tricks: there the contents are very short, so several by page, splitted on the title level. FAQ is a sort of tips & tricks, but with a little different layout the strong point of using categories is that it's easy, don't change the content of the pages, so it's easy to experiment, change mind... We can even have more than one tree, the tree search can be by user level or distro ID or... jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://dodin.org/galerie_photo_web/expo/index.html http://lucien.dodin.net http://fr.susewiki.org/index.php?title=Gérer_ses_photos --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
