Sj-
Yesterday, the O'Reilly Network's Scott Hacker addressed the end-user experience of setting up and customizing a wiki (with some eloquent commentary by visitors at the end) : _Where's the Movable Type of the Wiki World?_ ( http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/5794 )
Hacker suggests the Wiki world needs its own elegant, soup-to-nuts wikiproject, comparing the chaos of wiki communities and documentation to that of the blogging world pre-Movable Type. He shopped around for a wiki to use for an educational project (which was inspired by WikiPedia, retro camel caps and all), and finally settled on MediaWiki as the best choice. Unfortunately, its "scattered and obtuse" documentation, "stupidly difficult" customizations, and lack of an off-wiki user manual, left him cold. He notes he'd be willing to pay on the order of $100 for an actively developed, well-supported solution.
I'll use this as an opportunity to promote again the help effort on Meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents
This is really something every user can help with. There are now several services which offer free print-on-demand books in the style Cafepress offers t-shirts (in fact, Cafepress is one of them). So it should not be too hard to create a printed manual for MediaWiki.
I wonder whether we need something like [[en:Wikipedia:Collaboration of the Week]] for the whole Wikimedia community, where the current WMCOTW would be visibly promoted on all projects. This could help in jumpstarting things like translation, transwiki, new project proposals, embassies, etc.
Regards,
Erik
--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
I'll use this as an opportunity to promote again the help effort on Meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents
While our documentation isn't great yet, I think it is pretty darn good now and was a bit surprised by the recent article that bashed it. I think the real issue is that our documentation is
1) kinda hard to find and 2) only hosted on a Wikimedia website (he mentioned that he had to copy and paste material to the wiki he set-up).
So what we need is for each version of MediaWiki to come with its own version of the documentation in the help: namespace. Most of these pages would be static and replaced with a new version the next time that person upgrades. This would require the creation of a process by which new static versions are generated from the development version on Meta. But other open source projects have to deal with that already - why not us?
The only issue I see is licensing since the FDL and GPL and not compatible. But if the FDL material were already in a MySQL database and downloaded as such, then I don't see much of an issue.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org