Hi,
Sorry for the late reply and thank you for taking care of this
important topic. I've worked a bit on the English/French wikipedia
articles in the past few months so I guess I should give my POV :)
I'm also CCing the marketing-list as this is probably the most
appropriate list to discuss it.
On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 4:09 PM, Strainu
There are currently several issues with the way openSUSE is represented on non-english wikipedias:
1) There are different articles in different language (i.e. different articles for Suse Linux, openSUSE, SLES, SLED etc or just one article for all, with basically all the variations in between). 2) There is a lack of coverage for subjects related to openSUSE, like OBS, YaST, zypp etc. 3) The information in the articles might be out of date by up to several years.
True.
While I understand that it would be difficult for our global and local communities to also actively maintain the Wikipedia articles, I think we could take some steps to facilitate contributing to Wikipedia articles:
1) Find a common way to develop articles about openSUSE. 1.1 What articles should one start with (openSUSE, Suse Linux, openSUSE Project?) and what parts could get separate articles in a second/third phase? 1.2 How should all the articles relate to each other?
We could enhance and use the structure that we currently have in the English WP: SUSE_Linux_distributions (start page: history of company, quick product presentation) (Product sub pages) -- openSUSE (features) -- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server -- SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop -- SUSE Studio (Project and technologies sub-pages) -- openSUSE_Project -- YaST -- ZYpp -- oBS -- ...
1.3 What resources from the openSUSE wiki could be relevant to the various articles?
- Main portal pages of sub-project in the openSUSE wiki. - Product Highlight for specific release characteristics (might be too specific) - other ?
1.4 How can one minimize the quantity of information that "deprecates" rapidly?
By not writing it to Wikipedia :) I don't think that lot of information that deprecates quickly is really relevant for an WP article. keep it simple, stupid :)
2) Make sure that relevant images from the openSUSE wiki are also available in Wikipedia. Would it be feasible to use Wikimedia Commons as a repository for some of our free images (at least the screenshots)? I know that any mediawiki installation can use commons as an image repository under certain conditions.
This would be a good idea, but I'm not sure if this is possible as some WP allows the fair use of images (English) while other localized WP are way much more restrictive (ie, German or French WP). I personally don't contribute anymore to the FR wikipedia because of the imposed fair use restriction and focus on the English one.
3) Encourage the translators to get involved in writing the Wikipedia articles in their language. How can we do that best? If an openSUSE wiki exists in that language, perhaps we could somehow keep in sync a page on the openSUSE wiki and on Wikipedia?
I would avoid the duplication of content on WP and openSUSE wiki as much as possible. We should use WP for the encyclopedic content (history of SUSE/Novell company, evolution of distro, insight of major suse technologies, ..) and the openSUSE wiki for the more "technical" details. It is also very difficult and time taking to sync different language articles. I believe the best way is to work primarily on the de-facto main article (English WP) and then modify also the localized articles (which doubles the work load, and which is not always possible - for example when someone wants to add something in his localized WP but doesn't know English ).
4) Write all of the above on an wiki page (what title should it have?) :)
Maybe we could write a WP article guideline in the openSUSE wiki? Regards, R. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org