10 Mar
2007
10 Mar
'07
16:35
Why this article?
I'm trying to isolate topics and clarify terms, add what is missing in Franks
post, as it might be helpful to get more ideas how to get some working model
that can be improved later.
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> 1. Finding information
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> What we are facing here is IMHO a general (Media)Wiki problem. MediaWiki
> is developed for an encyclopedia. Users coming to wikipedia usually
> want to know something about a very specific topic. They type in an
> appropriate keyword and end up with the _one_ article containing the
> information they are searching for. There is simply no need for a
> sophisticated navigation.
>
> People coming to openSUSE.org IMHO have got more general interest, such
> as finding information about the installation or about how to set up
> WLAN. To satisfy these customers, structure and navigation is needed.
The same idea as here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Flat_namespace
Note:
We use subpages very often because automatic generated link to the root
article. I'm not sure that is good idea, and I was considering to move Portal
to something like:
http://en.opensuse.org/Download
which gives overview of all articles that belong to group on every visited
page. That will change somewhat with Portal namespace.
> Generally the focus of a wiki is on collaboration and content and not on
> structure and navigation. Therefore organizing content on a wiki is a
> very challenging task.
>
> So what tools does the wiki offer to organize stuff:
>
> - Namespaces
> - Categories
> - Portal pages
- index of subtopics like on disambiguation pages,
- group of articles tied with menu, like:
http://en.opensuse.org/Download or
http://en.opensuse.org/MiniSUSE#MiniSUSE%20Index.
...
> Namespaces:
> * Pro
> - search can be limited to namespace
> - namespaces can only be added by sysops, therefore the number of
> namespaces will not constantly grow
> - Standard Wiki tool
> * Contra
> - Pages need to be moved from the general namespace to a specific one
> Foo -> Bar:Foo
> - namespaces can only be added by sysops ;)
> - default namespaces are almost useless for average openSUSE user
> (Talk, Election, MediaWiki,...)
> - a document can only belong to one namespace
It can be linked from any using redirects, if it is necessary.
I didn't checked is redirect listed in:
- search,
- generated listings like http://en.opensuse.org/ Special:Allpageas
References to namespace:
General: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namespace
Mediawiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Namespace
Computing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namespace_%28programming%29
We are missing articles like:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Namespaces
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Namespaces
that will be here:
http://en.opensuse.org/Help:Namespaces
http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE:Namespaces
> Categories:
> * Pro
> - everybody can invent new categories
> - it's easy to assign a document to a category
> - a document can belong to several categories
> - standard Wiki tool
> * Contra
> - search cannot be limited to categories
> - since everybody can invent new categories, their number is
> constantly growing
- it is tedious task to keep them current,
- wiki editors have to agree on standard namespace schema
or whole effort is neverending chain of corrections,
> Portal pages:
> * Pro
> - everybody can invent new portal pages
> - can target different audiences
> - no layout / content restrictions
> * Contra
> - since everybody can invent new portal pages, their number is
> constantly growing
> - it's difficult to get an overview of all portal pages
>
> ==> Conclusions / Action Items:
>
> - discuss creating of new Namespaces
> - create a Namespace for portal pages
Besides Portal the major patterns names can be used as source of names that we
need:
GNOME
KDE
X11
Server
Development
etc.
The question is for the first 3 is that what we want, to isolate them from
default search, or we can come up with search engine that supports, for
instance:
KDE:KMail
if user asked for "kmail".
How that will fit in schema where we should have:
Mail - Servers
Mail - Clients - Kmail
Mail - Clients - Gmail
> - clean up categories
> - continue working on the portal pages
Before we touch both we have to agree on standard namespace schema.
How to organize branches in the naming tree?
Mail - Server
Mail - Client
or
Server - Mail
Client - Mail
What would be the top of this tree:
Applications
Software
or something else.
It will the best to have both with crosslinks, but than we need the tree to
see where we have to put crosslinks?
The next question is where to collaborate on naming?
Is it good and would be that enough to use:
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Namespace_Development
for instance, or we need another server where, all that have interest in, can
experiment with? I guess that it should be replica of the active one.
--
Regards, Rajko.
http://en.opensuse.org/Portal
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