Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-wiki (137 mails)

[Rupert Horstkötter <rhorstkoetter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Federico Mena,

thanks for your detailed input, much appreciated.

2009/10/22 Federico Mena <federico.mena@xxxxxxxxx>:
> 2009/10/22 Rupert Horstkötter <rhorstkoetter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > 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.
Aligned. I'd also propose a wiki-template "tested with openSUSE 11.0,
11.1, 11.2" on top of topics that apply to several versions of
openSUSE. That way, we can guarantee to the user that a certain howto
works with the flagged version of openSUSE.

> * 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.
Good idea! May you provide an example template from one of our bigger
subprojects here?

> > 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.
While the majority of interested parties seems to be on the same page
here, I'm not completely sure if the sandboxing approach leads to that
much overhead and is to be neglected in favor of the FlaggedRevs
approach. JFYI, I interviewed Martin Gräßlin from ubuntuusers.de last
Friday on IRC about the sandboxing approach (to get experiences - they
use something similar for their ubuntuusers.de wiki) and he reported
very good experiences with this approach from a QA perspective - and
an acceptable amount of maintenance time.

Btw, Martin Gräßlin has written a comparison of Wikipedia and the
ubuntuusers.de wiki some days ago at his blog (unfortunately in
german, but Google translate may help here)
http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2009/10/wikipedia-im-vergleich-zum-ubuntuusers-wiki/

That said, if the majority of interested parties is in favor of the
FlaggedRevs approach I'll certainly go along with that decision, no
question. Just some thoughts: I proposed the sandboxing as it
definitely guarantees an end of the uncontrolled wiki-growth we
currently have to face. Furthermore, with the proposed
proof-reading/reviewing process with a dediated wiki-forum in
combination with sandboxing we can make use of currently 35.000
proof-readers which hopefully leads to better QA and last but not
least, I cannot really see the disadvantage of "discouraging
contribution" I heard several times when implementing sandboxing. I
mean, we just limit the contribution (and for major edits) to the
Sandbox - it's just a matter of how to deal with new articles (and
major edits) initially. We don't discourage people to write articles
that way. Just my 2c! What do you think about it?

> 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
Definitely a good idea from a long term perspective. We just need way
more committed contributors to the wiki to be able to implement such
Wiki-Projects. Let's keep this in mind and come back to this idea once
we have the big showstoppers ironed out.

> 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_of_the_Month
That's something I really like. I had a rather similar idea when
riting my concept-proposal: What about announcing a monthly "focus on
<insert-topic-here>" to the broader openSUSE community (utilizing
planetsuse and/or the forums)? Like a call for participation to the
community to help improving a certain topic-area of the wiki.

Something along the lines: "In October we'd like to focus on PIM and
IM and we encourage everyone interested to test-out
article-instructions within that topic-area with various versions of
openSUSE and ensure the instructions are (still) valid and easily
understandable." The result would be QA and improvement of existing
ariticles. Next month we may focus on "Software Management" and so on.
For supporting purposes of community engagement, some Wiki team
members could sign responsible to support the efforts via IRC - just
an idea.

> 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.
Excellent idea! +1

> > 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.
Very valuable input, thanks. I guess the creation of Guidelines and
their proper promoting (I like the Sidenotice idea) is anyway an area
where we still have to do lots of brainstorming.

> (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.
>
> Thanks for coordinating all of this, Rupert :)
>
>   Federico



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