I think the main problem here is that you're seeing MediaWiki as a software
platform designed like Quicken, with a single purpose in mind. MediaWiki is
designed with a single purpose in mind, but that purpose is Wikipedia: The
people who use the software for their own purposes are important too, but
they're not what development is centered around. And since development
comes from many directions and people, the focus tends to be on making the
software work, not on making it orderly for people who are rummaging through
it.
On 6/13/07, Monahon, Peter B. <Peter.Monahon(a)uspto.gov> wrote:
However, one of us is going to have to write an
exhaustive, hierarchical
table of contents for all those pieces and parts of MediaWiki
setup-and-configure instruction manual we find all over the place,
combine duplicates, identify gaps. I'm just not experienced enough to
see MediaWiki clearly through what for me is still quite thick fog.
Does anybody else have a sense of how to impose a structure on the vast
resources at MediaWiki.org?
I think I see why the information about MediaWiki is less-than-ideally
organized: The people who are really interested in documenting things (like
you) don't necessarily have much knowledge of or experience with the
software, and the people who really know a lot about it (like Rob Church)
would rather be working on the software than writing documentation for it.
If you really want to change this, then you're going to have to unite the
two parts, either by learning enough about MediaWiki to document all the
things you want to document, or by getting the people who really know the
software well to help you. Judging by the responses to your emails, it
doesn't seem like those people are going to jump forth and help you along
every step of the way, so I'd suggest you start poring through every bit of
documentation you can find, whether on Wikipedia,
meta.wikimedia.org,
mediawiki.org, the software files (/includes/DefaultSettings.php has a lot
of neat stuff), third party how-tos (there seem to be all sorts of articles
scattered through the web on various MediaWiki subjects, if you do a Google
search), existing MediaWiki implementations, and anywhere else you can think
of. I've been running a wiki for a year now (with some previous experience
as an end-user), and I think I have a pretty good grasp of most of the
visible concepts of the software; I don't know nearly as much as I'd like
about all the code and whirring gears that make everything work, but you
don't necessarily need to know all about that to document things as a
sysadmin.
If the idea of transforming yourself into a MediaWiki guru so that you can
restructure the documentation is too daunting, then you should abandon your
visionary approach, find the specific tasks you need to do, get the help
(paid or otherwise) you need to accomplish them, and document your methods
as you go.
Good luck, whatever you decide.