On Thursday, 21. February 2008 00:36, Joshua Levesque wrote: Hi, sorry for not having answered earlier...
I have thought that maybe OpenSuSE should propose a "Wiki Overhaul Weekend" or two to accelerate the cleanup of the wiki.
I really like that idea. I think a force of ten or more people working for two days on the wiki will be able to accomplish a lot. However, before undertaking such a task we should first identify and prioritise areas we need to work on. From my point of view the primary task would be merging existing articles on even topics - unfortunately this is also the most time consuming task.
My original idea was that everyone would decide on category conventions and categorizing pages
I have spent quite a few days in the last months categorizing uncategorized pages and the more time I spent on it the more I doubted the usefulness of categories. Let me explain why: * John Doe will never dig so deep into the wiki that he will ever see a category page * There is no way to limit the search to certain categories * There is no way to assure that a KDE article will end up in the category KDE * Every editor can invent a new category by just typing {{Category:My new shiny category}}, therefore the list of categories will constantly grow * Reorganizing categories requires to _edit_ almost every article on the wiki and that takes ages and is a _very_ unsatisfying work So my idea of how to overhaul the structure of the wiki would be to first try to determine the 5 to 10 most important areas of interest of the site's users. Once we know these areas, we should try to set up reasonable overview pages for these areas of interest, just like Rajko and Josh have done with the portal or category overview page. Nothing new so far ;-). But - after having done so, we should form small teams of at least two people that will take care of a special area of interest. These teams will regularly scan the new pages list and determine which articles fall to their area of interest. having found these articles they will either incoroporate it to one of the overview pages or merge it with an existing page. The 5-10 areas of interest should, of course be linked from the homepage And, last but not least, we should try to improve the search. It works pretty well for wikipedia, but it is not really helpful for a project like openSUSE. Perhaps we should consider using Google (this would also allow us to search all openSUSE servers). -- Regards Frank Frank Sundermeyer, Technical Writer, Documentation SUSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, D-90409 Nuernberg Tel: +49-911-74053-0, Fax: +49-911-7417755; http://www.opensuse.org/ SUSE Linux Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nuernberg) "Reality is always controlled by the people who are most insane" Dogbert --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org