Peter, I believe that the book will answer a lot of the questions you have mentioned. It has a pretty good explanation of namespaces and categories. By the way they are basic ways to 'organize' bits. The online "documentation" is good but there are holes. You just have to keep looking, searching and asking "why?". Generally this works well. As for the hats, that is the least of the problems <G> DSig David Tod Sigafoos | SANMAR Corporation PICK Guy 206-770-5585 davesigafoos(a)sanmar.com -----Original Message----- From: mediawiki-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Monahon, Peter B. Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 12:33 To: mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Any leads on a basic wiki setup-and-configure instruction manual? Great speculation, Fred. Yes, we Googled and found a *book* (no web sites) that at least one person on this list has used and found to be supportive of the types of inquiries and problems I shared: http://www.packtpub.com/MediaWiki/book "MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide" by Mizanur Rahman. I'll let you all know how it works for me. Thank you, Chad and Dave! Aside: Dave, "How can anyone be expected to run a catalog with 79 (!!!) different baseball cap styles?" to paraphrase Charles de Gaulle - see http://sanmar.com/sanmar-servlets/CatalogBrowser?v=new&id=126 However, regarding the specific MediaWiki struggles I shared, I've found no satisfactory Google responses yet. I said so in my first post, but the admin quashed it. Too long? Some other discomfort? Who knows why my first post was rejected by the list-serve admin. So, instead, I re-wrote a shorter inquiry. Now, we can endlessly guess at what details I originally offered to share up front in this thread. Any other guesses from others? Angela, Thank you very much for offering your experience and insight, details in response to the 4 samples of the type of challenges I'm experiences. However, I either cannot even get to the screens you describe as working for you, or I cannot produce the results you imply should be available or that I want to accomplish. I appreciate your trying, but short of on-site troubleshooting, I don't think either of us knows exactly where our attempt to coordinate goes awry. Here's an example of my frustration finding MediaWiki documentation: What are "Categories" and why? http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Categories is meaningless to me since it does not explain what [Category] is used for, how it works, what are it's features and benefits. It's like teaching someone how to drive a car and explaining the steering wheel like this: "turn the steering wheel by rotating clockwise or anticlockwise". Hello, isn't there something missing in that? Such as: it's attached to a rolling car and you actually want to move forward or backward AND change general direction to get to a destination, probably on roads of some kind? So, I'd like to know what I can do with Category schemes. Can I easily design a Category scheme later in life and apply it with a macro, globally? Or, do I have to manually categorize each page? Can I categorize by selecting from a schematic clickable menu I build on my site? NOWHERE on that page (above) is there a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory and I would not have found more had I not exited from MediaWiki/WikiMedia altogether and wandered around Google a bit. But, Fred, please note that the two Category articles I found here are TOTALLY UNRELATED to each other and absolutely no help in intelligently planning and building and maintaining and rebuilding a MediaWiki implementation using Categories. So, I search WITHIN Wikipedia for [how to use wiki categories] and it barfs up nothing, suggesting that I jump ship into Google or Yahoo search. I graciously accept Google and find ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization (which Wikipedia couldn't find on it's own?) which also leads me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization_FAQ ! I answer my own question: "No." Remember the question? "Any leads on a basic wiki setup-and-configure instruction manual?" So, I'm printing my own, including further reading on Categories at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy ... this has l-o-n-g day written all over it! I'll read the book mentioned above and continue to print and read hundreds of web reference pages daily, and continue to develop, develop, develop. My US TMEP Wiki Project is up to ~569,072 words, ~4,593 [Edit]able headings, and it all fits on a 125mb USB flash drive WITH Apache, MySQL, PHP and more using WOS for development (WOS from Cornelius Herzog at http://www.chsoftware.net/en, thank you very much)! - Peter Blaise _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

On 2007.04.10 15:32, Monahon Peter B. - Peter.Monahon(a)USPTO.GOV wrote: Unfortunately, there are always going to be holes, especially things that are confusing to a novice. A lot of your criticisms are valid; there are topics that need connecting, areas that need background articles, etc. Since, as a new user, you are in the position of having these holes be rather more obvious to you than to experienced users, you can help by documenting the problems you have, and you are in an ideal position to help plug the holes when you do achieve some insight. That is not to say that this is not great software. Why would you be here otherwise? And one of the things that makes it great, is that everyone can pitch in to make it better in their own way. I think one of your example problems was with the sidebar. Here is an example of a new user trying to close that documentation hole. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual_talk:Navigation_bar#Problem_changing_t… There seems to be a lot of possibly useful stuff on these talk pages. Maybe this can help you, and maybe you can see a way to make it easier to find, or to clarify the related page. Regards, Jim Laurino