2009/10/22 Rupert Horstkötter

1. Use of Templates

This is perfect. One of the things that templates would let us do is to give people an easy way to organize the wiki by themselves, rather than always relying on "official wiki editors" to do it. Let me throw around some ideas: * Pages that refer to old versions of the distro; we can group them in a consistent way. Maybe we can have a little template that says "See instructions for [11.2] [11.1] [10.3]", etc. * Pages that refer to the same general topic but are not under a "topic/" hierarchy or otherwise in an easy-to-access group. We can provide guidelines on how to group them, create a topic template for them, etc. Topic templates could probably have common things like: - Link to the topic's toplevel - Link to the OBS project - Link to important documentation on the topic - Link to starting points - Link to bugs Some of our bigger subprojects already have these (KDE, GNOME), but other large chunks of the wiki could use similar templates very well.

2. QA Process I appreciate to see a lively discussion about the proposed QA process (the central part of my proposal) and I clearly see your concern from a maintenance perspective. cboltz proposed to utilize the MediaWiki Extension FlaggedRevs instead of the Sandbox/new-wiki approach.

FlaggedRevs sounds much better than sandboxing; the latter could lead to bureaucracy and pages which remain stuck in the sandbox even though they are in a good shape. I was reading this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editorial_oversight_and_control And it pointed me to "WikiProjects", which is a very valuable part of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject A WikiProject is basically a group of editors who have a common interest in one topic (botany, musical instruments, etc.) and who commit themselves to improving all the pages related to that topic. I really like their explanation of what a WikiProject is from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Guide There are all sorts of ways to encourage knowledge-building and collaboration. See for example this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Percussion They have a "Collaboration of the Month", where everyone participates to take one important article and make it excellent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Percussion/Collaboration_... For openSUSE, we could similarly encourage volunteers to maintain sections of the wiki based on related topics. Wikipedia has "featured articles": when you go to the main page, you get a snippet from an article that has been decided to be really good. This may be a good way to do two things for us: first, to promote really good articles, and second, to let people know about parts of the openSUSE organization or technical aspects that they didn't know before.

3. Wiki-Frontpage aka Portal

This is perfect.

4. Guidelines Robert outlined that the Guidelines should be easily understandable in 5-10 minutes and I totally support this point of view. We shouldn't scare away potential contributors but encourage them to participate.

Have you seen this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold It's a very nice thing to keep in mind for potential contributors :) Also, for people who don't quite know how to get started with the structure of a page, our own OpenSUSE_Style_Guide page could borrow some ideas from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Layout We could probably the MediaWiki:Sitenotice special page. This is the little area that can be made to appear automatically at the top of all wiki pages. We could have "cleanup weeks" every now and then, where the Sitenotice points people to guidelines about how to clean up pages, group related ones, etc. (By the way, the people in freenode's #wikipedia are very helpful. We could certainly get some good tips from them.)

So, next question is: how to proceed now?

I'm very excited about the possibility of those WikiProject-like things. It reminds me of when the GNOME team had a period during which we organized the GNOME pages really well; it was very productive. I can only imagine that it would be just as good for other teams.

An overview about timezones our team members live in would be great here - I'm in CEST timezone.

UTC -7 here (to be UTC -6 this Sunday on). Thanks for coordinating all of this, Rupert :) Federico -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org