[Mediawiki-l] Any leads on a basic wiki setup-and-configure instruction manual?

Tue Jun 5 22:04:52 UTC 2007

Peter

I have read many of the messages on the list of the last few weeks and
resisted jumping in until I saw whether you were going to find some untapped
vein of knowledge or, more likely, you would need to do a lot of the legwork
yourself with hints and near answers.

I do find this mailing list VERY useful but typically not because I get the
exact answer I need but more usually because it sends me off in the right
direction to find it myself. This is fine with me and I have learnt a ton in
the last 3+ months with help from some of the regular posters here.

The lack of comprehensive documentation, setup instructions or the like
whilst being somewhat frustrating is something that playing with Mediawiki
you have to learn to accept, for now. I really don't know anyone that has
the time to devote to building the type of documentation you are looking for
BUT I do suspect that if sponsorship were available there would be
candidates. I seem to recall you were with the USPTO, sponsorship of an open
source project from such an organization would be interesting indeed.

This isn't to say that people are only motivated solely by money but they
have to pay their bills which personally I find absolutely fine.

I myself needed some extensive changes made to the Mediawiki UI and after
spending a few days looking I realized that Mediawiki is a  complete beast
when it comes to the construction of the UI and its associated CSS.

I took the admittedly easy way out and simply got an expert (Jim Wilson,
cant recommend him enough!) to author a custom skin
(www.scribas.com/archives) which does everything we need. The site is
currently in stealth mode and offline but you get a feel for what it will
look like.

The easier parts of Mediawiki, for me, have always been the data driven
components. Data is data is data and so I have been able to change pretty
much whatever I want by virtue of the fact that the data is stored in a
known and well documented system, MySQL. Actually, on that note we are soon
to be looking to migrate the index from MySQL to Lucene for fast cross-site
searching/indexing of Mediawiki and Drupal.

Anyway, the reason for my post. I could be way off track here but I suspect
that a lot of the, admittedly logical, requests you have generated whilst
being perfectly reasonable within the black box, vendor supported world are
just a little ahead of their time in the Mediawiki/open source world.

Be it Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, Mediawiki or whatever open source project I
think you will always hear gripes about the documentation and feedback in
the event of bug/problem. I don't think mediawiki is any worse or better in
this regard and in fact having tested three other wikis I would say it is
without doubt the most solid out there.

So...the solution? I don't think there is one in the short term. As much as
I would love to see comprehensive documentation I wont be holding my breath.
Instead, I research, ask questions and generally make progress with help
from this mailing list.  Ideal? No, but you pays your money and takes your
choice. I could have gone to socialtext and got a fully supported wiki but
the cost would have been significant. Mediawiki is 'free' but comes with a
sometimes costly lack of support framework.

Oh, and the reason, in my humble opinion, for the fact that you see several
names for the same entity is possibly quite simple. There are hundreds of
contributors, each using slightly different phraseology.

Regards,
Paul

On 6/5/07 4:55 PM, "Monahon, Peter B." <Peter.Monahon at USPTO.GOV> wrote:

> 
>>> Peter Blaise wrote: ... I'm trying to compile a
>>> "see this on a MediaWiki screen, edit it ... HERE"
>>> ... listing for MediaWiki administration.
>>> Can anyone link me to a list that
>>> addresses these on-screen MediaWiki
>>> words and their synonyms, and shows
>>> where to edit/control their appearance ...
> 
>> Jan wrote: I'm not exactly clear on what
>> you want. Perhaps you're looking for
>> [[Special:Allmessages]]?
> 
> Thanks for your question and suggestion, Jan.
> 
> Wow, there's 145 pages of unintelligible documentation at
> http://yourwiki.com/index.php?title=Special:Allmessages&ot=html and
> http://yourwiki.com/index.php?title=Special:Allmessages&ot=php - no
> wonder it's hard to find quick answers for MediaWiki inquires.
> 
> By the way, that series of pages is also a good example of the
> misaligned jargon syndrome within MediaWiki community:
> 
> Go to [[Special:Allmessages]] and find a screen that says not
> "Special:Allmessages" but instead says "System messages"
> 
> ... so someone would find it by searching for ... which term?
> 
> Anyway, there are some synonyms in it which help resolve some
> ambiguities, but no directions to where to control the on-screen
> MediaWiki parts (not the contents of user contributed articles, but the
> on-screen parts of MediaWiki itself).
> 
> What I want is to know how to find what controls anything on a MediaWiki
> screen.  
> 
> Say a user asks me to change the logo - where do I find the control for
> that?  
> 
> Say the next user wants me to change the wording of the tabs across the
> top - where's the control for that?
> 
> And so on, for everything we can see in a default MediaWiki
> installation.
> 
> Example: I open the manual for my camera and the first thing it does is
> tell me the "names of the parts".  Then when they say, "open the battery
> door," I can look at their map and see what they are talking about.  And
> they don't sometimes refer to it as the "power source compartment".  No,
> it's always the "battery door".  When they say, "look at the top panel
> lcd," I then know they call it the "top panel lcd" when I contact anyone
> for help.  It's never the "horizontal display".  No, it's always the
> "top panel lcd" wherever it's referred to.
> 
> MediaWiki, however, has no such master "names of parts" page that I can
> find, making it hard to find the control for any MediaWiki screen
> element I'm staring right at!  And when we do have something on screen
> with an apparent name, it seems to be controlled by something under
> another name, such as, "discussion" is really "talk" and:
> 
> on-screen "navigation"
> ... = MediaWiki:Sidebar
> ... = http://{your wiki's URL}/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sidebar
> 
> And so on.  That's why I asked for help finding the names of the
> MediaWiki parts, such as:
> 
> - on-screen "search"
> ... = (synonym?)
> ... = place for a wiki admin to edit/control it
> 
> - on-screen "toolbox" =
> ... = (synonym?)
> ... = place for a wiki admin to edit/control it
> 
> Because I want to CONTROL those on-screen MediaWiki elements, and I
> can't find what that are called.  As, as exampled above, the name on
> screen is not used in any support documentation I can search at
> MediaWiki.org.  So, c'mon folks, if you know or can find it, please
> share links at MediaWiki.org or create it and then share links!  Thanks!
> 
> 
> 
> --
> 
> 
> 
>>> Peter B. wrote: ... and so on for ALL
>>> editable page elements in a MediaWiki
>>> installation.
> 
>> Michael wrote: Install a utility like
>> Firebug for Firefox and enable it.
>> That will allow you to see every
>> element on the screen and see what
>> bit of CSS it uses.  Useful if you want
>> to change the skin in any way.  It will
>> also allow you to see any other
>> HTML/CSS/Script stuff you can
>> search for in the various php files
>> that make up Mediawiki.
> 
> Great, Mike!
> 
> ... now if I can only get permission to install Firefox ...!!!
> 
> However, some MediaWiki page elements are controlled directly by typing
> 
> mediawiki:xxxxx 
> 
> or 
> 
> speciak:xxxxxxxx
> 
> and son on, for some entries into the
> 
> "search _____ 
> [go] [search]" 
> 
> area (whatever that area is called), yet some on-screen MediaWiki
> elements require finding, creating or changing lines in
> 
> xxxsetting.php 
> 
> and now you suggest looking for
> 
> xxxx.cs 
> 
> files as they may be the source
> 
> ... dang, Mike, spread the target w-i-d-e so it's impossible for me to
> hit, why dontchya?
> 
> :-(
> 
> I'll see if I can install Firefox on a USB drive ...
> 
> - Peter Blaise
> ...fighting the good fight, trying to make MediaWiki taste good for the
> users around me...
> 
> 
> 
> 
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