Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-wiki (137 mails)

[Rupert Horstkötter <rhorstkoetter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Community,

in context of my employment as openSUSE Community Assistant at
open-slx.com, I'm responsible to come up with a reasonable concept for
the openSUSE wiki. Our goal is to clean up the current wiki and
enhance its maintainabilty and consistency, while supporting the
openSUSE community with the concept implementation. In order to
provide a better wiki experience to the openSUSE community and to
enhance the content quality from a long term perspective, I'd like to
propose the following changes to the openSUSE wiki organisation and
discuss these with the openSUSE community. That said, I'm certainly
committed to this concept from a long term perspective.

---
Overview/Portal Page

We need a proper Entry page to the openSUSE wiki. The current
http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org does not reflect the
character of a documentation ressource. I'm aware of the issue that it
may not be possible to change this particular page due to political
reasons, but what we can certainly do, is introducing an
overview/portal page that is accessible by clicking the link "Wiki" in
the upper left corner of the current startpage (so to speak as a
buffer when accessing the openSUSE wiki). This is, from my
perspective, particularly important as we need a central place where
to get started – a place where we categorize/index the existing
content and provide easy access to the Usage Guideline, FAQ, the Wiki
Forum (see below) and related support information. A general approach
that already starts implementing this idea is available at
http://en.opensuse.org/Portal - credit goes to Wiki Team Member
Rajko_m.

Usage Guidelines

In order to ensure the quality of wiki articles, we need to create a
Usage Guideline for editors. I mean, the wiki documentation should be
easy to read, to understand and to maintain, but this cannot be
achieved without a proper hand-holding documentation about wiki
editing. While this information is already available (in parts), it is
currently not easily accessible and we need to change this. The Usage
Guideline should contain information about proper design, formulation,
conception and syntax of wiki articles. That way we can guarantee a
consistent overall openSUSE wiki experience for the user.

Sandbox Editing

Currently we have no QA and publishing processes for wiki articles.
This makes it very hard to assure a consistent quality across all
articles. In the past several approaches were made to clean up and
scan the wiki in order to sort and merge articles, to assure a
consistent quality, to merge duplicates, introduce meaningful
categories etc. However, we are still not where we want to be.
Therefore I would suggest to implement a publishing/QA process. This
process would look like the following: we introduce Sandbox editing
for new articles. We create a namespace "Sandbox" where every new
article will be created initially. As soon as the author of the new
article feels the result sufficient and conform with the Usage
Guideline, he presents the new article to the openSUSE community for
reviewing/commenting purposes. This can be done by presenting the
Sandbox article at @opensuse-wiki ML and/or a dedicated Wiki forum at
forums.opensuse.org – I myself propose the creation of a Wiki forum to
be able to reach out to a much broader audience than the
@opensuse-wiki ML could ever provide. Once the review process is done
and the new article meets the QA standards and Usage Guideline, a wiki
moderator moves the article out of the "Sandbox" namespace. That way
non-reviewed content won't end up in the wiki at all.

While the sandbox model will help us with new articles, it does not
solve the problems we have with the existing wiki content. therefore I
would propose to introduce...

Namespace "new-wiki"

In order to cleanup and re-organize the current wiki content, we
introduce a namespace "new-wiki" where we can build the new openSUSE
wiki. Migrating of existing content will then be done from the current
wiki to the "new-wiki" namespace. Wiki Team Member Fsundermeyer
already got started with a QA process for existing articles at
http://en.opensuse.org/Wiki_Team/Checked_Pages. Every new article not
yet available in the current wiki needs to be introduced via the
namespace "Sandbox" into the namespace "new-wiki". This approach
ensures the continous operation of the current wiki while building the
new one in parallel. Every article transferred to "new-wiki" needs to
pass the standards defined in the Usage Guideline, newly created
articles need to pass the reviewing process.

and to introduce...

Minor/Major Editing

Existing articles can be edited by everyone, although we'll encourage
the openSUSE community (within the Usage Guidelines) to make only
minor edits, such as spelling corrections, fixing links, etc to
existing pages. Whenever a major edit to an existing wiki-page needs
to be done, the author needs to request a working copy of the page in
"Sandbox" while the existing page remains untouched. Once the working
copy in "Sandbox" is done, the new article (major edit) needs to pass
the defined Sandbox reviewing process and afterwards the existing page
may (or may not) be replaced with the working copy from Sandbox – this
decision is the sole responsibility of the wiki moderators.

Semantic MediaWiki

We'll utilize the Semantic MediaWiki extension in order to enhance the
openSUSE wiki search results. Within the Usage Guideline (as part of
the QA standards), we encourage the openSUSE community to use the tags
of this particular extension while creating new articles in "Sandbox".
More information about Semantic MediaWiki can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki

Wiki Team

We need to strengthen the existing Wiki Team with openSUSE community
members. Furthermore we need to define the role and responsibility of
a Wiki Team Member.

Responsibilities I can think of currently:

1.ensure the conformity of the wiki content with the Usage Guideline
2.instruct editors how to write articles
3.categorize/index articles and create overview pages
4.take care of the Wiki forum/ML and gather community suggestions
5.responsibility for the Sandbox reviewing process

The major responsibility therefore is not to write articles but to
take care of the proper operation of the wiki in a moderating,
assisting and supporting capacity.
---

I certainly do not claim this concept-proposal to be complete yet, but
I'd like to encourage you to provide feedback and ideas. Let's
brainstorm together and improve/expand this concept-proposal to
finally come up with a concept that addresses the current drawbacks of
the wiki organisation, its quality, its usability and maintainability.

I sent this concept-proposal to @wiki and @boosters MLs as we
certainly need to sync the process we make with the openSUSE boosters
team. Please let the discussion take place on @wiki ML though to avoid
a split of the discussion.

Thanks,
Rupert
-- 
Rupert Horstkötter
openSUSE Community Assistant
http://en.opensuse.org/User:Rhorstkoetter
Email: rhorstkoetter@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Jabber: ruperthorstkoetter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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