Hello Rupert! On 15.10.2009, at 14:48, Rupert Horstkötter wrote:

Community,

in context of my employment as openSUSE Community Assistant at open-slx.com, I'm responsible to come up with a reasonable concept for the openSUSE wiki. Our goal is to clean up the current wiki and enhance its maintainabilty and consistency, while supporting the openSUSE community with the concept implementation. In order to provide a better wiki experience to the openSUSE community and to enhance the content quality from a long term perspective, I'd like to propose the following changes to the openSUSE wiki organisation and discuss these with the openSUSE community. That said, I'm certainly committed to this concept from a long term perspective.

--- Overview/Portal Page

We need a proper Entry page to the openSUSE wiki. The current http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org does not reflect the character of a documentation ressource. I'm aware of the issue that it may not be possible to change this particular page due to political reasons,

I think, we can change a lot as we (openSUSE Boosters) are starting the "Integrate all Infrastructure under one Umbrella From openSUSE"- Project (http://en.opensuse.org/Boosters_Team/Projects).

but what we can certainly do, is introducing an overview/portal page that is accessible by clicking the link "Wiki" in the upper left corner of the current startpage (so to speak as a buffer when accessing the openSUSE wiki). This is, from my perspective, particularly important as we need a central place where to get started – a place where we categorize/index the existing content and provide easy access to the Usage Guideline, FAQ, the Wiki Forum (see below) and related support information.

+1 I share your perspective!

A general approach that already starts implementing this idea is available at http://en.opensuse.org/Portal - credit goes to Wiki Team Member Rajko_m.

Yes, raiko_m did a great job and we should invest some more energy in this direction!

Usage Guidelines

In order to ensure the quality of wiki articles, we need to create a Usage Guideline for editors. I mean, the wiki documentation should be easy to read, to understand and to maintain, but this cannot be achieved without a proper hand-holding documentation about wiki editing. While this information is already available (in parts), it is currently not easily accessible and we need to change this. The Usage Guideline should contain information about proper design, formulation, conception and syntax of wiki articles. That way we can guarantee a consistent overall openSUSE wiki experience for the user.

+1 The basic Guilde Lines should be easy to understand and a new user should be able to get The Point in 5 - 10 minutes. This is very important to not scare new contributors! Of cause it's not possible to wrap all guild lines in one sheet of paper, but the "Mess Prevention Guide Lines" can be compressed to this size. The rest can be documented some ware else.

Sandbox Editing

Currently we have no QA and publishing processes for wiki articles. This makes it very hard to assure a consistent quality across all articles. In the past several approaches were made to clean up and scan the wiki in order to sort and merge articles, to assure a consistent quality, to merge duplicates, introduce meaningful categories etc. However, we are still not where we want to be. Therefore I would suggest to implement a publishing/QA process. This process would look like the following: we introduce Sandbox editing for new articles. We create a namespace "Sandbox" where every new article will be created initially. As soon as the author of the new article feels the result sufficient and conform with the Usage Guideline, he presents the new article to the openSUSE community for reviewing/commenting purposes. This can be done by presenting the Sandbox article at @opensuse-wiki ML and/or a dedicated Wiki forum at forums.opensuse.org – I myself propose the creation of a Wiki forum to be able to reach out to a much broader audience than the @opensuse-wiki ML could ever provide. Once the review process is done and the new article meets the QA standards and Usage Guideline, a wiki moderator moves the article out of the "Sandbox" namespace. That way non-reviewed content won't end up in the wiki at all.

+1 Very nice, I like :-) Maybe it's possible to automate this a bit, like it works e.g. with SVN checkins. So, you save your work and a "Sandbox-Article was published"-Message will be send automatically to a ML, IRC, etc. Here we could use Hermes, couldn't we?

While the sandbox model will help us with new articles, it does not solve the problems we have with the existing wiki content. therefore I would propose to introduce...

Namespace "new-wiki"

In order to cleanup and re-organize the current wiki content, we introduce a namespace "new-wiki" where we can build the new openSUSE wiki. Migrating of existing content will then be done from the current wiki to the "new-wiki" namespace. Wiki Team Member Fsundermeyer already got started with a QA process for existing articles at http://en.opensuse.org/Wiki_Team/Checked_Pages. Every new article not yet available in the current wiki needs to be introduced via the namespace "Sandbox" into the namespace "new-wiki". This approach ensures the continous operation of the current wiki while building the new one in parallel. Every article transferred to "new-wiki" needs to pass the standards defined in the Usage Guideline, newly created articles need to pass the reviewing process.

+1 ... cool!

and to introduce...

Minor/Major Editing

Existing articles can be edited by everyone, although we'll encourage the openSUSE community (within the Usage Guidelines) to make only minor edits, such as spelling corrections, fixing links, etc to existing pages. Whenever a major edit to an existing wiki-page needs to be done, the author needs to request a working copy of the page in "Sandbox" while the existing page remains untouched. Once the working copy in "Sandbox" is done, the new article (major edit) needs to pass the defined Sandbox reviewing process and afterwards the existing page may (or may not) be replaced with the working copy from Sandbox – this decision is the sole responsibility of the wiki moderators.

+1

Semantic MediaWiki

We'll utilize the Semantic MediaWiki extension in order to enhance the openSUSE wiki search results. Within the Usage Guideline (as part of the QA standards), we encourage the openSUSE community to use the tags of this particular extension while creating new articles in "Sandbox". More information about Semantic MediaWiki can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki

+1

Wiki Team

We need to strengthen the existing Wiki Team with openSUSE community members. Furthermore we need to define the role and responsibility of a Wiki Team Member.

+1

Responsibilities I can think of currently:

1.ensure the conformity of the wiki content with the Usage Guideline 2.instruct editors how to write articles 3.categorize/index articles and create overview pages 4.take care of the Wiki forum/ML and gather community suggestions 5.responsibility for the Sandbox reviewing process

The major responsibility therefore is not to write articles but to take care of the proper operation of the wiki in a moderating, assisting and supporting capacity.

+1

---

I certainly do not claim this concept-proposal to be complete yet, but I'd like to encourage you to provide feedback and ideas. Let's brainstorm together and improve/expand this concept-proposal to finally come up with a concept that addresses the current drawbacks of the wiki organisation, its quality, its usability and maintainability.

I sent this concept-proposal to @wiki and @boosters MLs as we certainly need to sync the process we make with the openSUSE boosters team. Please let the discussion take place on @wiki ML though to avoid a split of the discussion.

FYI: The Boosters Team started with the "Discoverable centralised documentation" (http://en.opensuse.org/Boosters_Team/Projects/Discoverable_centralised_docum... ) I really like your proposal. It's an excellent starting point for important changes! Thank you! Robert

Thanks, Rupert -- 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

--- Robert Lihm, Webdesigner - openSUSE Boosters Team SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, D-90409 Nuernberg Tel: +49-911-74053-0 - rlihm@suse.de ____________________________________________________________ SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) ____________________________________________________________ SUSE - a Novell business -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org

Rupert Horstkötter - 14:48 15.10.09 wrote:

Overview/Portal Page

We need a proper Entry page to the openSUSE wiki. The current http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org does not reflect the character of a documentation ressource. I'm aware of the issue that it may not be possible to change this particular page due to political reasons, but what we can certainly do, is introducing an overview/portal page that is accessible by clicking the link "Wiki" in the upper left corner of the current startpage (so to speak as a buffer when accessing the openSUSE wiki). This is, from my perspective, particularly important as we need a central place where to get started ? a place where we categorize/index the existing content and provide easy access to the Usage Guideline, FAQ, the Wiki Forum (see below) and related support information. A general approach that already starts implementing this idea is available at http://en.opensuse.org/Portal - credit goes to Wiki Team Member Rajko_m.

We were thinking about something a little bit similar but for all our websites: http://en.opensuse.org/Boosters_Team/Projects/Integrate_all_Infrastructure_u... We spoke about dividing people into groups basically according what are they looking for. Maybe it would be nice to have different landing wiki portals for these people once we will get the general portal.

...

Sandbox Editing

...

Namespace "new-wiki"

I really like these ideas. -- Michal HRUSECKY SUSE LINUX, s.r.o openSUSE Boosters Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xFED656F6 19000 Praha 9 mhrusecky[at]suse.cz Czech Republic http://michal.hrusecky.net http://www.suse.cz

Hello, thanks for your work on making the wiki more usable and of higher quality. I agree with many of your proposals, but I have some ideas on the implementation to avoid needless administrative work for the wiki team. Am Donnerstag, 15. Oktober 2009 schrieb Rupert Horstkötter:

Sandbox Editing

I understand the need to have a QA process for wiki pages, but the way you propose (having a sandbox: namespace, then move pages to main namespace) looks like lots of paperwork to me. I especially expect problems when a page is copied to sandbox: to do a large edit and someone else edits some things on the page in the main namespace. In this case, you'll loose the changes when moving the sandbox: version back to main or you'll get grey hair while merging everything to one version. IMH the better solution would be to use the "FlaggedRefs" extension (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs) that allows to have a public/checked version while working on a new version. The german Wikipedia uses this method, see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Gesichtete_Versionen I don't know how well it works because I use wikipedia read-only - the description sounds like it should be easier to manage than the sandbox: namespace.

Namespace "new-wiki"

This is another thing where the FlaggedRevs would be useful - flag the existing pages as OK (or fix them if needed) instead of copying them to a separate namespace. Besides that, this part of your proposal sounds like you want to build a copy of the wiki and then move all pages to the main space at once. I'm afraid this will result in overwriting several edits that are done to the main page after copying it to new-wiki. Oh, and will there be a namespace "old-wiki" for existing pages that won't be part of the "new" wiki? *SCNR*

Minor/Major Editing

Did I ever mention FlaggedRevs? ;-) I have to admit that in this case it possibly isn't perfect - I don't know if it can do a separate handling for minor edits. (But from the QA point of view, checking even minor changes can avoid that errors are introduced. Or: Is replacing "cat" with "rm" a minor change? *g*) I'd like to bring up another issue: Meetings and meeting logs Don't get me wrong - it's fine to have all meeting pages and logs in the wiki. Unfortunately they sometimes clutter up the search results (even if I don't have an example right now ;-) Proposal: Create a "Meeting" namespace that is not searched with the default search settings, and store all meeting pages and meetings logs there. Advantages would be: - "normal" searches don't bring up meeting logs. That's good because most times the meeting logs are not useful for the user searching for something. (Note: User != developer / contributor) - it's possible to search specifically in meeting pages and logs. This would be useful for developers and contributors in some cases. Disadvantage: - lots of pages need to be moved around Gruß Christian Boltz -- [Grundrechte] Natürlich gibt's da auch das berühme Recht auf freie Entfaltung. Andererseits: setzt das nicht auch zwingend vorraus, daß man vorher auch gehörig zusammengefaltet wurde? ;-) [Gerard Jensen in suse-linux] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org

Hello...I am a rather new observer, so I will try to catch up on this thread anyway...see below. � wrote:

Community,

in context of my employment as openSUSE Community Assistant at open-slx.com, I'm responsible to come up with a reasonable concept for the openSUSE wiki. Our goal is to clean up the current wiki and enhance its maintainabilty and consistency, while supporting the openSUSE community with the concept implementation. In order to provide a better wiki experience to the openSUSE community and to enhance the content quality from a long term perspective, I'd like to propose the following changes to the openSUSE wiki organisation and discuss these with the openSUSE community. That said, I'm certainly committed to this concept from a long term perspective.

--- Overview/Portal Page

We need a proper Entry page to the openSUSE wiki. The current http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org does not reflect the character of a documentation ressource.

I TOTALLY agree with this feeling and said so a while back. This initial page is pretty cluttered and "unfriendly" in my opinion. I'm aware of the issue that it

may not be possible to change this particular page due to political reasons, but what we can certainly do, is introducing an overview/portal page that is accessible by clicking the link "Wiki" in the upper left corner of the current startpage (so to speak as a buffer when accessing the openSUSE wiki). This is, from my perspective, particularly important as we need a central place where to get started � a place where we categorize/index the existing content and provide easy access to the Usage Guideline, FAQ, the Wiki Forum (see below) and related support information. A general approach that already starts implementing this idea is available at http://en.opensuse.org/Portal - credit goes to Wiki Team Member Rajko_m.

Raijko's mockup is actually pretty good. It's straightforward enough, though I might change the order of some of his categories. I don't see why we couldn't go with something similar to this and give Novell credit (if this is the political "problem" ) in the title area without going into the details on what's on the current "Welcome" page. I don't see much value in arguing about some of the other aspects of the wiki unless we can "fix" some of the issues on this first page, really. However, I like the use of the smaller graphics on our current Welcome page and would encourage keeping something like them as "bullets" for a more lighthearted visual appeal. Might we send comments to Raijko to keep going on this mockup?

Usage Guidelines

In order to ensure the quality of wiki articles, we need to create a Usage Guideline for editors. I mean, the wiki documentation should be easy to read, to understand and to maintain, but this cannot be achieved without a proper hand-holding documentation about wiki editing. While this information is already available (in parts), it is currently not easily accessible and we need to change this. The Usage Guideline should contain information about proper design, formulation, conception and syntax of wiki articles. That way we can guarantee a consistent overall openSUSE wiki experience for the user.

Sandbox Editing

Currently we have no QA and publishing processes for wiki articles. This makes it very hard to assure a consistent quality across all articles. In the past several approaches were made to clean up and scan the wiki in order to sort and merge articles, to assure a consistent quality, to merge duplicates, introduce meaningful categories etc. However, we are still not where we want to be. Therefore I would suggest to implement a publishing/QA process. This process would look like the following: we introduce Sandbox editing for new articles. We create a namespace "Sandbox" where every new article will be created initially. As soon as the author of the new article feels the result sufficient and conform with the Usage Guideline, he presents the new article to the openSUSE community for reviewing/commenting purposes. This can be done by presenting the Sandbox article at @opensuse-wiki ML and/or a dedicated Wiki forum at forums.opensuse.org � I myself propose the creation of a Wiki forum to be able to reach out to a much broader audience than the @opensuse-wiki ML could ever provide. Once the review process is done and the new article meets the QA standards and Usage Guideline, a wiki moderator moves the article out of the "Sandbox" namespace. That way non-reviewed content won't end up in the wiki at all.

While the sandbox model will help us with new articles, it does not solve the problems we have with the existing wiki content. therefore I would propose to introduce...

Namespace "new-wiki"

In order to cleanup and re-organize the current wiki content, we introduce a namespace "new-wiki" where we can build the new openSUSE wiki. Migrating of existing content will then be done from the current wiki to the "new-wiki" namespace. Wiki Team Member Fsundermeyer already got started with a QA process for existing articles at http://en.opensuse.org/Wiki_Team/Checked_Pages. Every new article not yet available in the current wiki needs to be introduced via the namespace "Sandbox" into the namespace "new-wiki". This approach ensures the continous operation of the current wiki while building the new one in parallel. Every article transferred to "new-wiki" needs to pass the standards defined in the Usage Guideline, newly created articles need to pass the reviewing process.

and to introduce...

Minor/Major Editing

Existing articles can be edited by everyone, although we'll encourage the openSUSE community (within the Usage Guidelines) to make only minor edits, such as spelling corrections, fixing links, etc to existing pages. Whenever a major edit to an existing wiki-page needs to be done, the author needs to request a working copy of the page in "Sandbox" while the existing page remains untouched. Once the working copy in "Sandbox" is done, the new article (major edit) needs to pass the defined Sandbox reviewing process and afterwards the existing page may (or may not) be replaced with the working copy from Sandbox � this decision is the sole responsibility of the wiki moderators.

Semantic MediaWiki

We'll utilize the Semantic MediaWiki extension in order to enhance the openSUSE wiki search results. Within the Usage Guideline (as part of the QA standards), we encourage the openSUSE community to use the tags of this particular extension while creating new articles in "Sandbox". More information about Semantic MediaWiki can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki

Wiki Team

We need to strengthen the existing Wiki Team with openSUSE community members. Furthermore we need to define the role and responsibility of a Wiki Team Member.

Responsibilities I can think of currently:

1.ensure the conformity of the wiki content with the Usage Guideline 2.instruct editors how to write articles 3.categorize/index articles and create overview pages 4.take care of the Wiki forum/ML and gather community suggestions 5.responsibility for the Sandbox reviewing process

The major responsibility therefore is not to write articles but to take care of the proper operation of the wiki in a moderating, assisting and supporting capacity. ---

I certainly do not claim this concept-proposal to be complete yet, but I'd like to encourage you to provide feedback and ideas. Let's brainstorm together and improve/expand this concept-proposal to finally come up with a concept that addresses the current drawbacks of the wiki organisation, its quality, its usability and maintainability.

I sent this concept-proposal to @wiki and @boosters MLs as we certainly need to sync the process we make with the openSUSE boosters team. Please let the discussion take place on @wiki ML though to avoid a split of the discussion.

Thanks, Rupert

-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- MzK -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org