On Saturday 28 June 2008 01:03:31 pm Bryen wrote:
On Sat, 2008-06-28 at 12:38 -0500, Rajko M. wrote: ...
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.
Thank you.
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.
I'm looking for a solution :-) The one with subpages is obviously not good. In another thread "GNOME and KDE should have their name spaces" is proposed to have name space for large groups of articles, though more than GNOME:<article title> Mediawiki software doesn't allow, so it will solve one level of subpages, but resolve need for general GNOME (KDE, YaST, Build Service, etc) category. ...
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.
http://en.opensuse.org/index.php?title=Special%3AAllpages&from=GNOME&namespace=0 This will list all pages starting with GNOME, but it will continue listing with other pages where title starts with G, H, I and so on until there is place on the page.
... 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 main page for "How to" articles is HOWTOs. That is what you will get with search for any of "howto, howTo, howtos, howTos". Due to automatic capitalization of first letter of the title there is no difference between howto and Howto and since openSUSE search box (function) is no more case sensitive then howTo and howto will give the same result. Wikipedia way to make sure that search word that is: - singular or plural; howto or howtos - different spelling; missing example - different capitalization; Howto or HowTo (not needed anymore) will always lead to the main article, in this case HOWTOs is to use redirects [1]. The redirect howTo is artifact from time when search was the same as the Wikipedia's ie. case sensitive except for the first letter.
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?"
The page http://en.opensuse.org/HOWTOs is central place. We can introduce another listings sorted by topic. In the main HOWTOs page list few most asked articles and the rest link using 'more ...' as a visible name for the link. ...
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.
Nothing new. See thread: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-wiki/2008-06/msg00001.html It evolved fast in direction where everything was topic, except the ways to improve wiki, but you can find links that are given as sample of simplicity. I can't see them all that rosie. Everyone has problems, including Ubuntu.
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.
The front page is the source of problems and it needs another facelift to sort out the content. Most of the page is OK, but some stuff is missing. Comment on Support link (FMonkey) that leads to http://en.opensuse.org/Communicate is valid point. Support should be the page that lists all support options. That includes online documentation indexes with links to articles sorted in few different ways (by software group, software component, version, hardware group, hardware component, manufacturer, etc) and communication channels which is present. This way user would not need to look in Teams to find GNOME, KDE, YaST and other related documentation. I'll pick up comments on different places and start new thread. [1] Redirect is page that has only one line, for instance: #redirect [[HOWTOs]] the string must start at the begin of the line, and there is no space between # and word 'redirect'. -- Regards, Rajko http://en.opensuse.org/Portal needs helpful hands. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org