Daniel, 2010/4/23 Daniel Gollub <gollub@b1-systems.de>:

Hello,

as you might know B1 Systems GmbH is a proud sponsor of the openSUSE project. We got contacted by some of the openSUSE Board member regarding supporting the opensuse wiki transition ... so here we are!

Warm welcome then and thanks a lot for helping with the transition. This actually is much appreciated by the whole team.

Philipp, Michael and myself already had a brief look on the Transition Guildelines: http://en.opensuse.org/Transition_guidelines

And already tried to move some already reviewed pages to the new instance. But we all really struggled with the current version of the Transition guidelines.

In my opinion it's way to complex and requires way too much time to study all those guidelines before actually starting with the transition (Anyone really read all those Guidelines?!). In fact it was so confusing to me that i asked Henne for a meeting to give me the big-picture of the wiki transition.

We're all aware that the Transition Guidelines are complex and comprehensive but Step 1 = Article Reviewing is certainly required to complete the transition, i.e. to achieve our goal to actually improve the Article quality. Plain moving of un-reviewed content won't lead to expected results. We'd just have the same mess with a new coat of paint that way and that's not desired. That said, Henne and Tom are actually already working on improving, i.e. simplifying the Transition Guidelines if possible (Tom mentioned this as this week's AI within in his last work report to the boosters list). I know that the process is tedious at first glance but we actually tried to put together what's actually needed to really come up with sufficient article quality + look&feel in order to provide a sufficient user-experience to our "customer" when browsing the wiki. It's actually difficult to explain this more straight forward to reviewers without losing information that needs to be taken care of.

So the summary of this meeting is mostly:

The current Transition Guidelines is a bit to complex for casual volunteers. (Btw. in Step1 and Step2 are instructions which sound to me redundant)

The focus of the transition should be:

Move (popular) content of the old-wiki in the right namespaces. There are basically three namespace which fit for 99% of the relevant content to transfer:

Main-Namespace aka. / ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Url: http://wiki.opensuse.org/$Article

Which is intended for "Product" (openSUSE Distribution(s) and affiliations) presentation/showcase. One might think of a brochure - for people which are completely new to openSUSE and maybe "Linux" and want to get informed about the great distribution.

And not which 100-line-bash-assembler-workaround and 2.5-firmware-patches and thirdparty kmps are required to get the latest webcam-chip running.

So this might be one of the most important and namespaces which requires high quality content and regular maintenance. To make maintenance easier the number of pages might should be limited to a reasonable level.

Quality, instead of quantity!

In short: a potential user interested in openSUSE

SDB-Namespace ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Url: http://wiki.opensuse.org/SDB:$Article

This namespace might contain in the new instance most articles. (hennes guess was approx. 95% of the old wiki)

This namespace is intended for:

 - HOWTOs  - support instruction for common problems  - setup instructions/guides

... directly related to the openSUSE Distribution(s).

In short: stuff a plain-user would be interested.

openSUSE-Namespace ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Url: http://wiki.opensuse.org/openSUSE:$Article

This namespace contains:

 - Developments (Buildservice, Yast API details, ...)  - Contributions (How to contribute a bug, artwork, ...)  - Project-Organizational stuff (Board, ...)

... related to the openSUSE Distribution/Project.

Contains _not_: distribution HOWTOs, Instructions, ...

In short: content which is relevant for opensuse contributors, testers, developers .. and everything which is beyond a regular user.

-- End of Namespaces --

Philipp, Michael and me are going to take the top 500 populare pages from the old instance and will assign them to the relevant namespaces. So casual volunteers don't have to puzzle which namespace is the right namespace.

That's a valuable contribution I'm really looking forward to as it simplifies the migration process for volunteers currently working on this. Thanks in advance for this contribution!

For the initial transition i would suggest to:

 - transfer the article to the right namespace (as written on the list we're   going to provide)  - with correct spelling/capitalization of the article name (URL)  - adapt templates if needed

That's all. That's should be a pretty simple instruction - and nearly none openSUSE Wiki-Background or Wikipedia-Guidelinde-Diploma is required.

All further migration/transition listed items ...

 - "migrate the opensuse:Wiki Guidelines"  - "migrate the standardized template"  - detailed review of correct typesetting ("format check" and "content check")  - "Ensure that title capitalization is lowercase"  - "Use a navigation bar if required" (???)  - "Ensure that articles are correctly categorized" (categorize != namespace.)   # Is there already a list of predefined categorize? If not -> postpone

... of the process (from Step1 and 2) should be optional or done after the initial transition.

For "Step 1: Article review" i would suggest to stop this step and just do brief "openSUSE relevant"- and obsolete-checks. And do more fine grain content and format checks as described in "Step 1" once the initial transition is done. Otherwise i doubt the review and transition will be ready by 1st June.

I disagree here (as outlined above). Without doing a sufficient article review of most-interesting content for our "customer" the whole creation of a new wiki isn't worth it from a content perspective, i.e. providing quality content. You're right that we may not manage to transfer all pages of the old wiki to the new instance in time doing it that way (following the article reviewing) but that's ok. Let's come up with what we're able to provide in time and follow-up with the rest of the content after the initial launch but let's do it right from the beginning. The intention to say "we can do it afterwards" is clear to me but honestly this won't work out as moved content is considered as done and it'd be dissimilar harder to take care of article quality afterwards. The general strategy here is "Quality before quantity" as we really want to make a difference with the new wiki this time and this will only happen if we do it right from the start. en.o.o (and de.o.o) will stay alive as a temporary instance after switching the DNS at launch date anyways and that provides the opportunity to populate the new instance on the fly after going live initially. That all said, I already requested/asked for help with the Reviewing Process, i.e. to support Jon Rocker with the Transition Tables (linked from within the Guidelines). We're at approx. 60% here atm and helping hands are required to achieve a significant higher count here. We don't need to do this captious but we won't move completely un-reviewed content to the new instance as this isn't in sync with our overall goal = improving the documentation in order to provide something really valuable to the community. I hope my explanation is clear from a Project Management perspective. Best, R

Sorry, for this long mail - but I'm sure if you managed to read all those guidelines you're able to read this "long" mail. It's just an idea - if you don't like it we can try to adapt to your current process.

Best Regards, Daniel

-- Daniel Gollub                        Geschaeftsfuehrer: Ralph Dehner FOSS Developer                       Unternehmenssitz:  Vohburg B1 Systems GmbH                      Amtsgericht:       Ingolstadt                                     Handelsregister:   HRB 3537 EMail: gollub@b1-systems.de          http://www.b1-systems.de

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