[dokuwiki] Recent massive changes on wiki.splitbrain.org

Hi all,
(Sorry if message doesn't appear at the right place, I'm quite a newcomer with mailing lists).
I'm the one who did the changes yesterday. I saw your comments on that and I mainly agree with them. I'd just like to clear my intentions step by step : 

1. Why did I do all these changes ?
-- I'm working with dokuwiki since about a year. I did use it for some sites, and I found it quite useful. I did already developed some plugins although I don't think they're good enough to be posted. My first aim yesterday was to look more deeply in the splitbrain wiki to learn more about DokuWiki internals. To crawl the wiki, I did use the do=index feature and so I began to look at the first pages. The first things I noticed is that some plugins where at the wrong place, and a couple of pages where orphans, and were either old pages from 2005/6 or pages posted by users without any sense of organisation (wiki:farm / wiki:farm2 / wiki:yann:proposals and a couple more).
So I began to do some cleanup. However I was perhaps a bit too enthusiastic and began to move some pages like the page linked from the manual or feature. I did just move the small pages with just a few links to them and no translation. The fact is I came to the conclusion we missed some guidelines on publishing. So I did what you saw this morning.
2. Why did I do it anonymously and without discussing it within the mailing list -- My first intention was not to edit the wiki this way, I just started by a simple crawling and some non hazardous cleaning, but as time went by, I did noticed quite some inconsistencies and I tried to fix them. -- Concerning the wiki:config, I thought not about the mailing list as I thought it was mainly dedicated to the dev part. That's why I modified the wiki:config page with a FIXME tag at the beginning, just to notify users to that. And that I moved pages with a "Moved" title, as I'm really aware of the deadlinks problem. 

3. Finally, what would I like to do (or be done) ?
-- The fact is Dokuwiki seems to have now a large community around it. I'm not the first to do mistakes and I think I won't be the last. And still, I'm not the least experienced user. I'm not really used to work with a community but I still know much about development. So I think it's important to have clear guidelines to the different types of personnes that may come on wiki.splitbrain.org. Maybe the wiki is clear to you who know well this site but think about newcomers like me or even less experimented. Take the example of the wiki:config page. I'm a newcomer, I did copy the DW files on my server and I want to know more about how to configure it. I go on the wiki:dokuwiki page and I click on the "Configuration" link. Whao, I jump directly to an obscure (even if useful or even essential) "706 lines of wiki code" page. Maybe we should think about first explaining that it is possible to go to the admin page through the web interface, and that it is possible to do things through a user friendly form. And that to go deeper it is possible to go within the /conf dir, and modifiy files..... Alright my way was not the right one but maybe we could act that there's something to do....
My thinking is we could first determine a basic hierarchy separating a basic documentation namespace for simple users or curious people, a manual/config namespace for admins and advanced users and a devel section for the developers. If I tried to move things within the features namespace, it is basically because a page like wiki:attic has nothing to do in the wiki root, and this page is somewhat unuseful. A more useful hierarchy would be :
- wiki:[basic documentation namespace]:attic or revision -> DW features a revision mechnism that allows you to come back to a previous version in case of a bad editing ;-). See manual/config for more details....
- wiki:[manual/config namespace]:attic or revision -> The revision system of DW stores revisions as files within that dir. Conf options are available to fit the system to your needs. See also plugins or tips. See development section for more info...
- wiki:[development ns]:attic or revision -> More tough doc. See devel tips, etc....
Also "wiki" namespace should not be writeable to force user to look for a better place when they create something. Maybe the best solution however is not to modify existing pages but create whole new namespace to sort things up and to let the old links be updated little by little. 

Hope this all helps,
Yours faithfully

Colin LORRAIN

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