Team, we still need to agree on either Sandboxing or FlaggedRevs as our QA process for the openSUSE Wiki - I'm the assignee to start this discussion... so, here it is. During our Meeting last Friday, the general concensus was to go for the Sandboxing approach, but I know that there are other opinions as well from parties not joining the Meeting and thus I'd like to give another possibility to discuss the Pros and Cons of both Approaches before we decide which one to implement finally. During our meeting last Friday, we came up with the proposal to get the opportunity to test both approaches in a testing environment to give the Wiki Team an actual idea. Frank, would it be possible to set this up? This isn't urgently needed but would certainly be desired. So far the foreword :-) As I outlined several times before, I myself am for Sandboxing (I mean this was an integral part of my initial concept-proposal) as our QA Process. I'll explain it again: 1. New articles would need to be created in a Namespace Sandbox, so e.g. Sandbox:Nvidia. As soon as the author feels the article confirm with the Guidelines and sufficient from a content perspective, he'd present the new article in Sandbox for reviewing purposes. This would be done utilizing a (to be created) Wiki Forum at forums.o.o where we may use a crowd of 35.000 proofreaders (at best). The author gets feedback that way and the article should evolve. After a certain time, the new article will be moved and categorized into the main Namespace and thus be part of approved openSUSE documentation. The decision to move the article would be the responsibility of a Wiki Moderator. Thus I proposed to define the role of a Wiki Team Member as a supporter/moderator (this also makes sense for e.g. the mentoring program we'd like to implement - different story) 2. Existing content? We need to distinguish between minor and major edits here and define those within the Guidelines. A minor edit covers spelling corrections, add a link as a reference etc. Within the Guidelines we encourge editors to do only minor edits to existing pages. Whenever a major edit needs to be done/is desired, the author requests a working copy of the article in Sandbox where he can work on it. Once it's done, the new article needs to pass the reviewing process, just like a completely new one, and the decison IF that article is finally sufficient to replace the existing one in main Namespace is the sole courtesy of the Wiki Team. We certainly may need to restrict this approach to the main Namespace (content interesting for the end user), but the decision about the structure of the Wiki is ongoing - started by Henne. Thus we need to look how that works out in the end (and restrict the Sandboxing approach just to parts of the Wiki structure we'll agree on). Yeah, that's it! I feel this as a valid approach to stop the uncontrolled growth of the openSUSE Wiki and to ensure proper quality of articles confirm with the Guidelines from a design, formulation and conception perspective. To get feedback about this approach I interviewed Martin Gräßlin from wiki.ubuntuusers.de - they have imho one of the best wikis out there from a usability and quality perspective and they use this approach for ages. Martin told me that the acceptance factor is awesome and the process is easy to handle for the Wiki Team. That's what I can tell you, i.e. forward to you as an actual experience. The alternative would be to go for the FlaggedRevs MediaWiki Extension proposed by cboltz and afaik supported by Rajko_m. FlaggedRevs, in short, provides the opportunity to have several revisions of articles in parallel and the one approved by the Wiki Team is shown to the user, the others are hidden until one of them gets approval and replaces the currently shown one - at least that's how I myself understood this approach. The Cons from my perspective are the additional maintenance of a MediaWiki Extension that has writable access to the database (according to Frank). Also I do not see how we should utilize a Wiki-Forum then (at least not obviously) and I myself feel no real advantage over the Sandboxing. That said, the intention is to give this discussion another period to evolve, so please, FlaggedRevs supporterrs, jump in and explain. Finally I'd like to close this discussion with an ultimate decision about the QA process we're going to implement - at some point in time we need to go forward and we need an agreement for either approach to cover/explain it within the Guidelines. Just now, the tendency by the team is to go for Sandboxing (checked in the Meeting - see transcript http://en.opensuse.org/Wiki_Team/Meetings/2009_10_30-transcript) but I'll certainly go along with whatever decision made by the team - I'd just like to have a decision. I'd propose to discuss this for a timeframe of one week as of now and afterwards we vote - sounds sufficient? Thanks, R -- Rupert Horstkötter openSUSE Community Assistant http://en.opensuse.org/User:Rhorstkoetter Email: rhorstkoetter@opensuse.org Jabber: ruperthorstkoetter@googlemail.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org