On Friday 30 July 2010 10:16:27 Brandon Philips wrote:
On 02:56 Fri 30 Jul 2010, Rajko M. wrote:
On Thursday 29 July 2010 20:24:09 Brandon Philips wrote:
Lets look at the mission statement of the openSUSE: namespace[1]:
"And the openSUSE community's openSUSE: namespace to collaboratively write on documentation for their projects and teams."
http://en.opensuse.org/Help:Namespace "openSUSE - Presentation and working pages of our teams, tools and projects. Everything for the contributors to our project."
That is a more helpful definition. Maybe the namespace should be contrib: then? Or perhaps move all of the user facing documentation to docs:?
To be precise we would need to go trough the articles on both new and old wiki that qualify as not presentation or technical instructions, and see how they can be sorted out.
Possible alternatives:
0. No namespace at all, the openSUSE community exists at openSUSE.org! We have an entire domain to call our own! Why do we need a namespace?
Breaks separation of content on part that is used to present openSUSE to casual visitors (majority), part used for troubleshooting which is minority, and part for contributors which is even smaller.
As a contributor the namespaces are not helping me and are confusing.
How has Wikipedia managed to create a huge and useful repository without namespaces?
The have some and they are used the same way as we do, it is just a different need and different names. They also employ different servers for stuff that is very different by content. What criteria they used to create separate server I don't know. Our problem is that definition of namespaces and its usage is still work in progress. Initially SDB was meant for all technical stuff, but some basic instructions must be part of the distro presentation effort.
We absolutely don't want to push information on 1001 problem, collected in last 15 years of SUSE, in eyes of people that clicked on some web link to see what is openSUSE.
If this was the original problem it would seem it is being solved in a poor way. There are lots of ugly pages in the wiki that are out of date and confusing but shoving everything into a namespace plasters over the issue; sweeping it under the rug.
I agree that there is a lot of old pages that found their way during initial transition, but the namespaces have nothing to do with attempt to hide them. Grouping in namespaces is meant for the future organization.
Solutions:
- Lots of hard work fixing and pruning pages, staging the new wiki at a diferent URL
We already did a lot of that, and what you see is the best of old wiki :)
- Introducing a wiki just for users e.g. welcome.opensuse.org or docs.opensuse.org
In our case creating separate servers will just allow to use Main namespace as default for any content that is on topic with server purpose, but linking from presentation article to troubleshooting, or hardware database article will go over external link. It will help to write article without thinking about prefixes, but we will have to think about servers. The idea to move presentation articles to welcome.opensuse.org has the same problem. IMO, the only criteria to use separate welcome.o.o would be that we have to separate extensions that are used to enhance content presentation. Some of them can be resource hogs, so giving them separate server will help to keep other sites responsive. ...
Certainly, I agree with all of these definitions of developers. But, things in the openSUSE namespace include governance and community building information like openSUSE:Board, openSUSE:Ambassadors_events, etc
The openSUSE is obviously overloaded. Above examples, plus team pages and other governance stuff, are what I see as natural fit to openSUSE namespace, but not technical stuff like Build service, YaST, Web YaST, or artwork stuff. Any ideas how to sort that too?
... Community: at least adds the hint that these community oriented pages and not part of the openSUSE consumer documentation.
Everything is community. We don't have foundation yet, but we don't want to hint separation on some non-community and community activities. Separation is more in our heads as echo from SUSE times. It is now by who created content, contributor paid by Novell, or somebody else.
4. project: ? This is my second choice as nearly all of the links on http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Project are to the openSUSE: namespace...
That is default, but as soon as you choose name for the wiki it will become that name, in our case "openSUSE".
I don't follow this.
What is now openSUSE namespace is actually Project. If you don't choose name for your wiki during setup, it will stay Project.
1-4 have their problems but at least they are not redundant.
We had redundancy before. This one will not change much.
Agreed. At the very least we can figure out a name which might make it clearer what the mission of this namespace is. Although, preferably just get rid of it all together.
See above comment about openSUSE: . ...
True, I have REDIRECTED many pages already.
Thanks. Just don't forget to add links to categories: http://en.opensuse.org/Category:Redirects_to_stay http://en.opensuse.org/Category:Redirects_to_delete
There is already a lot of internal links that should be changed in case that we want something different as a project namespace.
Add two levels of redirection? It isn't too late. This new wiki is only a few weeks old. The total damage is small today.
No need for 2 levels of redirection :) The wiki procedure is to change first redirect that points to second page that is also redirect. You just make first redirect link to actual page. And, I will urge everybody that reads this, to think twice before removing any redirect. In one or two years we can start thinking about removing them, but right now it is really bad idea.
Brandon
-- Regards, Rajko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org