On Sat, 2008-06-28 at 12:38 -0500, Rajko M. wrote:
On Friday 27 June 2008 07:15:49 am Rajko M. wrote:
We should decide how to handle subpages ie. those like: HowTos/GNOME/ExtendingNautilus
For little benefit of automatic back links (sometimes called bread crumbs) page title look like URL path which is not good layout. When someone moves page those back links mix with redirect back links making line that should help browsing, actually confusing. To see what I mean try this link:
http://en.opensuse.org/HowTos/GNOME/ExtendingNautilus
Page was moved to make HOWTO naming consistent, and now user has 2 links to follow.
I propose to use subpages to one level depth as additional explanation to the main article, that user has to read and then go back to the main topic, and only in such cases where additional explanation is specific to main article. If it is about how to switch to root, that is used all over the wiki, so very much not specific it has to go to separate page.
Today I was looking at http://en.opensuse.org/Category:GNOME and discovered one more case where using subpages makes more trouble than benefit.
All GNOME related pages are listed under letter G . I took that as an example. All efforts of GNOME team to make pages easy accessible led to result that is not better than already present in All Pages: http://en.opensuse.org/index.php?title=Special%3AAllpages&from=GNOME&namespace=0
The same is valid for any other example of subpages overuse.
The problem is that there is more groups of articles that made internal wiki categories pointless to use: YaST, Build Service, KDE etc. The KDE is special case, as Las2kn0 tried to clean that up and assign more helpful categories. We don't have many tools to index and present for browsing openSUSE wiki content. Disabling them for large groups of articles is probably not the way we want to go.
Compare that with http://en.opensuse.org/Category:HOWTOs When creating HOWTOs index, pflodo asked to put word HOWTO at the end of the article title. Now articles are listed by letter, not all under H.
I would like to hear proposals how to solve this, for both present problems and future.
I am the person that made the effort to clean up our GNOME pages in recent weeks. In fact, we plan to have a "Wiki Day" soon to better structure our GNOME pages soon. However, I am willing to put that off until we get better guidance from you on how to properly organize and make pages easier to find for our readers. As I raised in a previous thread several weeks ago, a number of pages fell through the cracks because they did not have the GNOME category tag attached to it. We had to ask around our team and HOPE that someone remembered a page (and its URL) that they may have written way back when. Through searches, we were able to recover 12 additional pages beyond the pages we currently have listed when you select the GNOME category. We're left wondering whether there are still more pages out there that no one remembers. The problem with it is we have to remember to add the GNOME category to a page. It would be nice if somehow, we could see every page under http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/, as we're sure there's some useful information that might have slipped through the cracks. It also helps us to determine what information is no longer relevant and can be removed from the system. Regarding the other issue brought up about links to HowTo pages, when I created the /Accessibility/ page and the /GNOME/HowTos/, I, as well as consultation with others, decided it would be most prudent to have all howtos listed under /HowTos/ and then link to them in /GNOME/HowTos/ as well as /Accessibility/. In this way, we don't have groups of HowTos stashed all over the place, but rather one single place that hosts all HowTos. The reason behind that was to ensure that if a reader decides to go to /Whatever/Howtos or to /Howtos/ directly, they will always find relevant howtos, rather than hunting all over. "Do I find my Howto here or there?" We have a keen interest in furthering the number of GNOME howtos in the near future and as a team we are actively taking approaches to make this happen in a more timely manner. I am also keen to do the same with /Accessibility/ because presently there is no clear line of sight to a11y information when a user visits o.o. In all honesty, and I hear the same from many others, I have found the wiki to be rather unnavigable and difficult to find information. Search is only effective when you know what you want to search for. But searching and browsing are two very different things. I only know about pages I go to now because of word of mouth on the IRC channels and then bookmark them for future reference. A well organized site shouldn't require its readers to bookmark every single useful page. Bookmarking at the homepage should be sufficient. I just now discovered the "Team" link on the homepage. But seriously, if a user wants to learn more about GNOME or KDE in openSUSE, why would they think to click on "Team"? I don't think users in general associate components of their operating system with teams. Bryen --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org