On Monday 14 April 2008 09:08:49 pm Josh wrote:
Rajko M.
Thanks for hanging around.
I guess that having link to http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Style_Guide http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Browse http://en.opensuse.org/Portal/Templates with very short explanation that they should be used as guidance will help a lot.
And categories in openSUSE:Browse would be the official ones.
As mentioned, no one can prevent users from creating new categories, the Wikipedia has tons of them, but with set of official categories wiki editors would have lesser to worry about. Message to users would be simple: If you want your article to be automatically listed in 'openSUSE Browse' than use provided categories.
The general idea is to limit wiki editors focus to some articles so that quality can be raised. New guys, when they come with question where they can help, should have answer, not as I used to say: "Look around and find what would you like to do."
-- Regards, Rajko
This all sounds good. Now I'm wondering, seeing as though we do not have too many people focused on reorganizing the wiki, where do you think us few should concentrate our efforts first? Should we be working on this idea of official categories or focusing more on the portal?
Maybe once these two projects get going we can keep a running page of what portals need maintainers and what aspects of the wiki need work. This way, we can point new editors to this page and ask them to choose a focal point. I know there are many parts to the wiki and the list could easily get large, but we could at least have some main sections and most definitely a list of the unmaintained portals.
We can focus on openSUSE:Browse first, though if some idea comes about Portal nothing forbids to implement it on the fly. Important is to set limited number of elements that we can work on, just as Frank mentioned. Although I would not spend much time to find which are the most important, as I already attempted to do. With few editors for all tasks, we have to see how to improve, if necessary, openSUSE browse, and that is all. When time comes it can be rebuild from scratch.
However, in my opinion, major task is to create environment where someone that is asking what to do have an answer. I have to look for examples in other places. Someone had that problem and it has some solution. We can't advertise participation without having some tasks to offer, having tools and standards in place.
For instance this looks good: http://www.openoffice.org/about_us/new.html
This is example what I meant as smaller tasks that belong to big project: http://groupware.openoffice.org/glow/dev/opentasks.html
There is many more pages listed with query "openoffice open tasks"
Than this can help with idea about ownership of tasks/projects: http://www.mozilla.org/owners.html If someone has a question about particular topic it is possible to find with whom to talk.
The Wikipedia idea works because there is huge number of topics and every contributor can find something that interesting. The openSUSE wiki is different, with many more users that are starting with Linux. Just stating that they can contribute is not good enough. We have to identify tasks for them.