On 1/4/06, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Rob Church wrote:
Brion: Couldn't we adapt the script that populates the MediaWiki namespace to do the actual adding to the wiki upon installation, if the administrator opts for this? Or at least, duplicate it, rename it, and tweak it for this particular purpose.
Sure, if there were something to fill it with.
So basically what would need to happen is a separate space would need to be carved out somewhere, and then documents would have to be hand-migrated to that documentation-wiki. This project would have to then appropriately label the licenses and then volunteers would have to rewrite the non-pd documentation into the public domain.
This wiki's help data would then need to be bundled up as a documentation package either included with or separately downloadable.. and it would be either inserted by the installer or installed by the administrator (i.e. some sort of importable thing, or mysql dump or the like).
This wiki would be the "master" and various wikimedia projects would import it or link to it. The hope would be to have people go to the one reference wiki to make changes.
It all seems really messy to me, unless there is a way to have this documentation data automatically synced between multiple wikis. And while you're there, it would be nice if edits on any of those wikis automatically propagated to every other wiki.. but that's blue-sky. =/
Even if that documentation bundle was ready right now, there is no way for another wiki to import it all and then to mark every page in their help section to indicate that what is seen locally is just a copy of the official documentation-wiki version. This would be necessary to warn people to go to the source wiki to make changes and that any local changes could be overwritten without warning by a future import. I recently posted a feature request which would cover this use (per-section announcements)
As an aside, maybe such documentation would be better in its own private namespace, to not conflict with Help?
Just brainstorming..