Hi all,
I'm cross-posting this to both the wiki and the translation lists, as well as on the Romanian list in the hope that I will receive the broadest possible feedback.
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of coverage for subjects related to openSUSE, like OBS, YaST, zypp etc. 3) The information in the articles might be out of date by up to several years.
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? 1.3 What resources from the openSUSE wiki could be relevant to the various articles? 1.4 How can one minimize the quantity of information that "deprecates" rapidly?
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.
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?
4) Write all of the above on an wiki page (what title should it have?) :)
I'm looking forward to your ideas regarding the points raised in this email.
Strainu
P.S. Sorry for the poor formatting of this email, I just can't seem to get it right today :)