[openbeos] Re: The Wiki

Hi Jorge,

On 9/29/06, Jorge G. Mare (a.k.a. Koki) <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
Waldemar Kornewald wrote:
> On 9/29/06, Jorge G. Mare (a.k.a. Koki) <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Wikis are a very good collaborative tools, easy to use and flexible. I
>> agree with Austin that a wiki would be beneficial to Haiku.
>
> But what do we want to use it for?

For example, for community contributed how tos, tips, troubleshooting,
etc., and as a sandbox for creating documents in a collaborative way.


Basically, you are talking about a knowledge base and the drafts area
I mentioned. I'm not sure if the sandbox is really useful...maybe it
introduces more confusion by giving the impression of a second website
(no strict rule on where to place content).

In order to define the role of the wiki, I fell we need (at least IMHO)
to understand the scope of the website too (first?). I have to be
honest: this is where I am having difficulty; there is a lot of content
in the new website, but I am having difficulty understanding under what
criteria it was included, and how it is intended to be organized. But
then, maybe it is just me...


What exactly do you think is causing this confusion?
I guess the problem is that we mix end-user content with developer
content. My intention is that our developers use Drupal as a tool for
writing RFCs and anything else which is useful for development. There
should be no other tool. This makes up most of our website content
which is organized using categories because there will be too many
articles for tree-based navigation. The rest is the most
relevant/useful information for end-users and companies. The website
should prove our three target audiences (devs, users, companies) with
sufficient information. Anything going beyond the normal use-case
(e.g.: installing Haiku on your mobile phone, hacking kernel&driver
configuration files, creating non-standard distributions, etc.) should
be part of the knowledge base.
Does that answer your question?

The wiki may be also a good place to put the BeOS documentation that has
been abandoned but that may still be useful to Haiku. Putting such
documents in the wiki could also make it easier to adapt old
documentation to Haiku.


This should really be part of the official documentation system (which
doesn't have to be a wiki).

I would also move all the articles on the website that have the "This is
not finished..." label to the wiki until they are finished.


I think this is not a good idea because it separates our development
content between two systems. All development articles must be
accessible on the Drupal site. Even if something is just a small idea
we should not move it away from our primary content management tool
(otherwise it might get lost because other developers don't use the
wiki so much). As long as development content is useful it should be
on our site. Nobody really expects perfectly worked-out RFCs. The name
RFC (Request For Comments) already suggests that it's unfinished.

The existing wiki has already build up a nice knowledge base, so I don't
see why it cannot continue. We would just need to define better what
goes into the wiki and what doesn't.


Okay, we can give it a try. Let's only use it as a knowledge base.

But I think that we still need a better solution for end-user
documentation. Does MediaWiki support something like branching (via
namespaces?) and locking a whole namespace (for finalized
documentation)?

If DocBook is so terrible, what speaks against using reStructuredText?
You'd still have to learn SVN, but there are GUI SVN tools which
simplify the learning process considerably. Having a simple wiki where
everyone can modify the final end-user documentation is bad (write
access should be limited to the draft version, for example).

> Who will remove spam?

Is spam a still problem if you require login? 

Well, we had problems with bots registering themselves, automatically.
The wiki should really require email verification and/or captcha
validation.

> Nothing. I never said it should be limited to development. Actually, I
> think that it should *not* be used for development because Drupal and
> Trac are good enough (hopefully) and the wiki would just introduce
> more confusion (remember, we recently had two developers edit old
> articles in the wiki instead of the website).

I was not referring to anything that you may have said, but to the "This
website serves as a platform for the creation and editing of articles
relating to development (as in programming)" statement in the wiki
itself (see under "About This Wiki").


Ah, that's a wrong statement, then (except if our developers really
want to use the wiki instead of Drupal, of course).

Bye,
Waldemar Kornewald

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