On Thursday 29 July 2010 20:24:09 Brandon Philips wrote:
Hello All and Everyone-
Today, I wish to talk about redundancy. In particular things that add no new information and are a simple rearrangement of the understood data. In other words: repetitiveness for no-gain at all.
Problem -------
I was trying to point a community member at the Kernel Git page today so they could get involved. But I was baffled to find it gone. Searching a bit I ended up finding it at this URL:
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Kernel_git
Two openSUSE's in one URL, what a deal! Without that openSUSE: namespace I might have thought I was going to grab the Ubuntu Kernel Git...
As we are breaking URLs all over with this new wiki anyways can we take a moment and consider the URL monsters we are creating here? Just look at it once again:
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Kernel_git
There has got to be something better, lets find a solution. :)
Solution --------
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."
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. 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.
1. devel: ? Oh, but these teams are not necessarily developers
Developer as in? Software developer, business developer, community developer, film developer (chemical), etc :) Creating artwork is development. Writing documentation is development. Creating communication infrastructure is development. Developing marketing strategy is ... (right development). In a project that has so many activities as openSUSE reserving word developer to software developers is a bit of disservice to all other development efforts.
2. teams: ? Erm, no because then it would be teams:Kernel_git which makes no sense
It is not only about teams, so clearly no.
3. community: ? Maybe, but community:Java packaging cookbook looks strange
Not strange at all, but it is redundant as well. Of course it is community, not Martians :)
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".
1-4 have their problems but at least they are not redundant.
We had redundancy before. This one will not change much.
Lets discuss what problem this openSUSE: namespace is trying to solve and how we can make sane looking URLs on our new wiki. And lets do it fast so we can avoid breaking URLs again.
Too late for not breaking anything :) There is already a lot of internal links that should be changed in case that we want something different as a project namespace.
Cheers,
Brandon
-- Regards, Rajko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org