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@opensuse.org Jabber: ruperthorstkoetter@googlemail.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-boosters+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-boosters+help@opensuse.org