Hello, One of the topics we discussed at the IRC meeting on Friday was Wikipedia-like Portals. Here I'd like to summarize how we could make use of it and what steps are needed. Overview ======== Henne Vogelsang came up [1] with the idea of adopting Portals from Wikipedia to openSUSE wiki. The main goal of portals is to nicely present related stuff and give overview about one topic, which means something like an entry page to one part of the wiki. I can imagine e.g. KDE, GNOME, YaST, OBS, Developers, Packaging, Education, Medical and other Portals. Wikipedia uses prepared skeletons and templates which makes creating of new portals quite easy, especially with help of some guidelines [2,3]. Some examples of Wikipedia's portals: [4,5] How are the Portals created =========================== Let's take a look how new Portals are created in Wikipedia. You start by creating new page into which you 'substitute' predefined skeleton [7], which defines several sections that will appear on the Portal page. Portals on Wikipedia consist of several sections. Different portals use different layouts and sections. Here's the list of common sections used in Wikipedia: - Browserbar - navigation bar with links to top-level portals - Intro - some introduction to the portal, what is it about - Selected article - Did you know? - list of some short facts - Picture of the month - Categories - WikiProject - Things to do - Topics - Index of articles - Related portals - News - .... Some of the sections are same for all portals, like Browserbar or Selected article (which, if I understand correctly, use some magic to select random article belonging to the topic). These are implemented using templates. We should think about which sections would be useful in our wiki. Other sections, like Topics or Related portals are unique across the portals, which means they are created manually for each portal. The templates Wikipedia uses for creating portals require ParserFunctions extension [6], which in turn requires MediaWiki 1.7.0 or above. Currently, our wiki runs on MediaWiki 1.5.8, so it seems it is not possible to deploy that before upgrade to new MediaWiki is done (which, if I'm not mistaken, should happen soon after 11.2). On the other hand, we will not probably need all the templates Wikipedia uses, so there's a chance that the ParserFunctions extensions won't be necessary. What to do ========== Here are the tasks we need to do if we decide to adopt the Portals to openSUSE wiki: 1) Identify which sections/templates would be useful in openSUSE wiki --------------------------------------------------------------------- Let's go through some Wikipedia portals and think about the sections they use. I don't think we need 'Did you know?', 'Selected article' or 'Picture of the month' sections. On the other hand, there might be other sections useful for our wiki, like 'List of Howtos' or 'Application of the month'. 2) Design how default openSUSE Portal should look like ------------------------------------------------------ Which sections should the default Portal contain and what should be the layout? Since the Portals can be customized, this does not mean designing universal portal layout, just something from which it is easy to start with new portal. 3) Port needed templates from Wikipedia --------------------------------------- The big question here is what wiki instance should we use for development. I see three options: - setup testing wiki instance with ParserFunctions extension somewhere - wait until openSUSE wiki is upgraded - try how that would work with current wiki (that would answer the question whether ParserFunctions extension is actually needed :) ). 4) Adopt Portal creation guidelines from Wikipedia -------------------------------------------------- This one should be easy :) So, what do you think? Does this all make sense? What did I miss? [1] http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-boosters/2009-10/msg00004.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Portal/Instructions [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Linux [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Mathematics [6] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ParserFunctions [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Box_portal_skeleton -- Best regards / s pozdravem Petr Uzel, openSUSE Boosters Team ----------------------------------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. e-mail: puzel@suse.cz Lihovarská 1060/12 http://www.suse.cz 190 00 Prague 9, CR