On Sun, 6 Oct 2013 11:37:45 +0200 Guido Berhoerster <gber@opensuse.org> wrote:

...

https://en.opensuse.org/Special:PendingChanges

Wow, I guess that's quite effecive in discouraging any new contributors...

That is not the biggest problem :) Wiki is like any other project, it works as long as there is someone that cares and has time. I didn't visit PendingChanges for some time. Usually I fix that from http://en.opensuse.org/Special:RecentChanges but when I'm busy for longer periods of time amount of not fixed stuff is growing and you can see it in PendingChanges. The number of pages there was lesser then 100, which is not that horrible as the fact that only that many edits where done by people that have no permission to review pages. In essence, going trough the list I have seen only few new contributors.

Thanks a lot for that. Is there actually any coordinated effort going on behind the wiki or has it largely been abandoned?

There are people that keep wiki running and inaccurate list is here: http://en.opensuse.org/Wiki_team There is more people that work on language wikis and English at the same time, but they are not listed. Also some in the list are not active anymore. Bigger problem is that Wiki organization is too complex and in some places upside down to some basic Wikipedia rules which are meant to make wiki reading, editing and contributing as easy as possible to people with limited time for wiki activity. For instance there is Wikipedia rule that internal links should be guessable. This means when one wants to refer to more information about Xfce it is preferable to add only double square brackets around word and have [[Xfce]] working as a link. Right now it will work that way because there is redirect, but "properly" handled by our own rules is to use [[Portal:Xfce | Xfce]] first time. This forces contributor to learn where in some namespace (Portal, openSUSE, HCL etc) is article located, and use long syntax each time s/he wants to link Xfce. In practice that results in pages that have fewer links, lowering usability for readers as they have to search for explanations, when in the Wikipedia they just click a link. In other words complexity and differences to Wikipedia increases amount of time one needs to learn our wiki special rules and lowers the number of people that are able to contribute. Only those with extraordinary interest in a wiki and large amount of time to learn our rules can contribute. There are reasons why is all this set as is and ignorance about Wikipedia experience is just one problem that we had at the time. Mainly all boils down to lack of time and people that will analyze existing problems, learn new tools that came with new version of the wiki and come up with long term solution. What we have is the best we could do with people, their skills and time they had at that time. I only hope that some of readers of this mail will come up with ideas how to improve wiki and make it easier to swallow for new contributors. -- Regards, Rajko. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org