[openbeos] Re: The Wiki

Hi Waldemar,

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.

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.

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.

Even if the answer is no, I would not just drop the wiki altogether.
Instead, I would use it as a knowledge base for community contributed
content, but within certain defined guidelines, so that there is no
unnecessary duplication of content.


A knowledge base might be a good use for our wiki. I just don't know
whether enough people will maintain it in case we use some other tool
for our documentation.

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.

Who will remove spam? 

Is spam a still problem if you require login?

Also, is there no better (more specialized) tool for this?
What would be the appropriate way to ask a question? Do you have to
create a new page and manually add links to your question? How do you
track unanswered questions? Do you just put your question on a big
page and the person who answers will take care of creating a new page
and adding appropriate links? That could result in a great mess.
In a wiki you don't really have good guidelines and simple submission
forms. I'd prefer a tool which shows "unanswered questions" and
"answered questions". Everyone would be able to submit and edit
questions and answers like in a wiki, but the interface would be much
simper.

A Q&A system would be nice, but that's not what I was referring to. I meant "knowledge base" in the general sense of the phrase, as in a collection of data that users can look for the information they need.

I have a question: why is the wiki limited to articles related to
development? What's wrong with having, for example, Haiku Tips for end
users in the wiki?


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").

Koki


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