Roger wrote: ... I just now started a page to document MediaWiki user interface customization. You can help write this page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interface
Thanks, Roger.
Great start. Now, where's the MediaWiki "table of contents" scheme into which your "Manual:Interface" page fits? Searching MediaWiki.org for "interface" brings up: 1st = http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:User_interface ... nope ... skipping all the unrelated noise ... 40th(!) = http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Navigation_bar ... some relevance ... and so on! I didn't look further. How would anybody find Manual:Interface?
I searched for "manual" and get the "manual" page at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual ... which has NO table of contents for any "manual" for MediaWiki. Doh! Likewise http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Manual ... but http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Flat_namespace contains this thoughtful tease from http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rogerhc (hey, that's also you!):
"... * Flat namespaces are easier to navigate, * The fewer levels of hierarchy the better when dealing with collaboration, * People can't collaborate if they can't find what they are looking for ... An encyclopedia is a classic flat namespace. So is a dictionary. The names of pages in MediaWiki.org are not encyclopedic nor dictionary like because the topic of MediaWiki is narrow and deep, not shallow and wide like an encyclopedia or dictionary. So keeping the page namespace on MediaWiki.org flat and easy to navigate is not as easy as keeping the page namespace of Wikipedia.org or Wiktionary.org flat. But the need to keep taxonomic hierarchy on MediaWiki.org as simple as possible and flat as practical is important. It is management of information complexity. Subpages may hurt site usability more than help because it can be hard for newcomers to guess where in the hierarchy something can be found and hard for veteran users to remember how to type out the exact hierarchy under which a page is located. Categories and other labels should be kept as short as possible so that bunches remain easy to read and navigate at a glance and individual instances remain easy to type from memory into a page...."
Hmm ... easy to navigate a flat space? In what city do you live?!? ;-) In the real world, I drive my car on a linear (not flat) surface of the globe, but I use a reference road map to find destinations and plan my trip, I have many ways to search through preview resources, and I also have alternative ways to get from point A to point B: air, ground, water. I don't see such resources in MediaWiki's "simple" search and no automatic meta table of contents.
Special:Allpages is a start, but only brings up pages in the "Main" namespace, right? But, at MediaWiki.org, there's also: Talk, User, User talk, Project, Project talk, Image, Image talk, MediaWiki, MediaWiki talk, Template, Template talk, Help, Help talk, Category, Category talk, Manual, Manual talk, Extension, Extension talk! 18 additional namespaces where disconnected pieces and parts of any "MediaWiki setup-and-configure instruction manual" may lay!
Does anyone know how to really list ALL Allpages - as that might be a great place to start building a total table of contents that grabs and organizes such disparate pages as are scattered across, say, "Manual:..." and "Project:..." and so on, all related in content, but not related any other way? Someone at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project_talk:Support_desk#MediaWiki_Overvi ew_-_database_structure asked what the MediaWiki/MySQL database structure looks like, and the answer is elsewhere at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Database_layout. How do we plan to coordinate such disparate contents from "Project talk" and "Manual:nnn" ... and make it findable and easy to navigate?!?
If anyone thinks the "search" box is the answer, they're dreaming! Why do we think there's such scattered info as it is? Because the "search" box results are not very sophisticated. I've expanded mine to show: Hits per page: 100, Lines per hit: 20, Context per line: 100, and I scan the entire list before giving up. Is anyone else that patient with the MediaWiki "search" feature results before Googling, instead?
In the computer resource world, I'm used to controlled vocabulary hierarchies like http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/. Photography is my second language, and I have thousands of image files to catalog and share, so hierarchies like "cat is under animal and mammal and domestic and color and date and location" are no problem for me and any relational database to manage .. hey, isn't MediaWiki built on a relational database?
I guess when I'm looking for the pieces and parts of "...a basic wiki setup-and-configure instruction manual...", analogies like "road map" overview are also appropriate.
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?
-- Peter Blaise (see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Peterblaise for my paltry contributions so far, mostly just questions!)