On Wednesday 04 November 2009 05:49:39 Rupert Horstkötter wrote:
While I'm not that familiar with the implementation possibilities of MediaWiki (Namespaces, Categories) and its advantages/disadvantages (I certainly leave this to more Wiki-knowledged people), I definitely support the general idea behind it. The main namespace is interesting for an end user searching for content and pages covering "Meetings", "Team Pages", "Developer documentation", "Marketing" and such shouldn't be considered in our Wiki Usability Concept (that is clearly targeted on the end user).
That is idea behind namespace usage. Remove from default search all that visitor that is not logged is not looking for, but as with YaST example, and sincerely almost everything else that is software related, there are areas that user want to see, and those that we want to present to attract new skilled contributors, like development activity, or any contributor in community related areas. How to have both is what we should look for, and in areas that can't be reconciled we have to make decision what is more important, having happy end users, or having more contributors.
Also the implementation of our QA process (be it Sandboxing or FlaggedRevs in the end) doesn't make too much sense for these kind of pages or even discourage people contributing to it - I mean who wants to pass a reviewing process to edit a User page or add some information to a Meeting agenda? Thus taking those pages/contents out of the Main namespace (and maybe the search) makes perfect sense to me.
My opinion on Sandbox is not really affirmative. I'm not sure how it will work out: 1. Who is going to enforce that? 2. Who is going to confront authors that want article published, and in reviewer opinion it is not ready? 3. Who is going to review articles? 4. How many people will accept that workflow? Experience with SDB: is not extraordinary. Not many people ever wrote there, and many of those that did ignored not very hard formatting and style requirements/recommendations. The SDB is actually good organized if authors and editors follow instructions, but it requires quite some work to keep it that way. Besides article http://en.opensuse.org/SDB-Howto-FAQ shows one problem with SDB presence on wiki. It is confusing where to write. I'm not sure that many people will ever try to understand workflow diagram at the end of article. FlaggedRevs: It is not a magic stick that will solve problems by itself, it requires tweaking if one wants to get the it right. General description http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:FlaggedRevs Technical details http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs Blog http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/07/30/quality-assurance-in-an-open- project/ Unlike plain wiki, that is explained in a lot of details on Wikipedia and Mediawiki, FlagedRevs have above 3 pages and that is about it. It is experimental feature that might be helpful to keep content of articles in good shape, but it will not organize access to articles, we have to do that anyway.
Thanks for pointing that out.
More points above :-) -- Regards, Rajko OpenSUSE Wiki Team: http://en.opensuse.org/Wiki_Team People of openSUSE: http://en.opensuse.org/People_of_openSUSE/About -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org