Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-wiki (137 mails)

["Rajko M." <rmatov101@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

John, 

Welcome to mail list dedicated to communication about openSUSE wiki. 
For the rest see below. 

On Friday 16 October 2009 21:39:42 John E. Perry wrote:
> oldcpu wrote:
> > As an occasional wiki contributor, I find it very difficult to follow
> > the style guide for the syntactical details of links and such.  And
> > hence I'm probably one of the most guilty.
> >
> > I'm not disputing the style guide is needed and should be followed  :)
> >
> > ...
> >
> > Rajko M. wrote:
> > > One approach to solve problem is to instruct authors to use Wikipedia
> > > style guide for article and section title capitalization, that require
> > > 1st word of title and any proper nouns within a title to be capitalized.
>
> I've just joined this group, so I don't know how things are done or what
> goes on here, so please forgive any missteps, such as proposing the
> obvious or already present.
>
> Many organizations provide templates for these purposes.  Writing style,
> it's true, is hard to capture in a template, but standardized formats,
> required links and their formats, layouts, all can be encapsulated
> easily into a single document, or a small set of documents, each with a
> specific function that could be described in a master documentation
> page.  These documents could be used as a container for any new or
> updated pages.

I see the same thoughts that I have. 
The only difference is that I have no experience in practical steps that has 
to be taken to make this happen. Other that work on documentation are usually 
very busy this close to release, have additional duties and have no time to 
create such template articles. 

> Never having seen (or even having previously heard of) a wiki design
> language, which I infer is being referred to in some of the messages
> I've read during the past few days of watching this list, it also seems
> a few layout scripts could be used as a resource for prospective editors.

There is no special scripting language, it is markup language used in source 
text of wiki articles, that will be converted by MediaWiki software in final 
page layout. For instance:
  == Section title ==  
is converted in html tags:
  <h2> Section title </h2> 
which is understandable for common web browsers. 

It is another story why MediaWiki authors created set of tags that differ from 
standard html. 

IMHO, they tried to make basic editing simple, instead of hitting 4 different 
keys to type <h2> and 5 to close that tag, user has to hit 2 times same key to 
open and same to close tag that mark start and end of section header (title). 
For those familiar with html this seems not necessary, but for those that are 
not I can see advantage of special wiki markup. More time spent creating 
content, lesser learning how to format article. 

The most basic text with headers and links can be created knowing:
== is section title (up to 4x'=' makes sense)
[[ ]] are link delimiters for articles located on the same wiki
one empty line is end of paragraph
 space at the begin of the line gives all output in fixed font

For just a bit more learning there is: 
''  '' is italic delimiter
'''  ''' is bold text
:         indentation
;         bold until end of the line
----  will draw the line across the page

Playing with multiple formatting tags one can discover how they influence 
final layout, and the most important thing, while direct usage of html is 
discouraged, you can have the same effect if you use <h2> and == .  

> Speaking of which, I subscribed because I'd like to participate.  How do
> I go about getting involved? Not being knowledgeable in either linux or
> suse's variations on linux, I doubt that I could contribute much in the
> technical areas, but I could help out in regularizing the pages'
> layouts, style, and so forth. 

We need someone with experience in above mentioned, as that is important part 
of overall wiki appearance and user experience. 

As you can see, there is no real TODO list that I can point you to. Some 
directions are written in http://en.opensuse.org/Wiki_team , and a bit more in 
a http://en.opensuse.org/Wiki_Team/Current_Actions , but you can find that 
insufficient. 


We are just starting discussion how to make wiki more appealing and useful 
place, so comments and questions from your prospective are valuable feedback 
for everybody involved. 

Maybe you can recommend some targeted reading for the rest of us that have 
interest in documentation organization and not so much luck with general 
Google search. 

> John Perry

-- 
Regards, Rajko

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