On Dec 27, 2003, at 10:08 AM, Agon S. Buchholz wrote:
Dan Carlson schrieb:
The main problem from my perspective is
documentation for users of
the wiki software in sites which are not straight-up mirrors of
Wikipedia.
I agree. That's the reason why I started to restructure and rewrite
the documentation (
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation).
The problem with the current official documentation
(
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User's_Guide) is, that it's
not a "User's Guide", but more of a mixture of Installation,
Configuration, User's, Administrator's, and partial even Developer's
Guide. According to MediaWiki terminology, a "User" is also an
administrator; however, it will take the normal user some time to
distinguish this wording.
I've noticed the same thing. And though the English Wikipedia has a
decent page through the Policies and Guidelines that provides a partial
list, it's still not always useful in connecting to all the appropriate
pages.
I'm trying to write documents for different
targeted users; people,
who want to know what MediaWiki is, should read a mostly non-technical
overview (
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation:_Introduction);
people who want to write articles should read the User's Guide
(
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation:_User's_Guide)ide),
explaining how to edit and write pages; people who want to set up a
MediaWiki site should read the Administrator's Guide
(
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation:_Administrator's_Guide)ide),
explaining hw to install and confugure the software, and so on. These
documents have to be structured from the scratch, be written for
different levels of experience, and stay focused for specific tasks
related to the work of these target groups.
That's a very good idea; I'd be willing to pitch in and help out in
rewriting/reorganizing some of that data.
But,
considering that the MediaWiki software is made publicly
available for download and for establishing other websites, I wonder
if it might be useful to have some kind of help "module" -- that is,
a collected copy of the documentation pages that can be easily copied
and set up on other sites. Possibly, this could also add a new
"Help:" namespace which would help distinguish those pages for the
general users.
Nice idea. But do we want another namespace?
True, another namespace will add some more complication. But take a
look at the following list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:
List_of_articles_in_the_Wikipedia_namespace
Not only is that a daunting amount of information for people like me
who are trying to set up separate wiki sites with a new name, but it's
also a job that is complicated by the fact that we have to go through
and change all the internal links in the documentation to match our new
namespace. If the documentation used a "Help:" namespace, then none of
the links would have to be updated, and all an administrator of a new
site would need to do would be to download the documentation database
dump and upload it. And it would also help separate the site-specific
pages (like Wikipedia:) from those "meta" type pages that are about how
a user (that is, a site visitor) can operate the MediaWiki interface.
Possibly, it would be a good idea to make it easy to change the name of
the website in the documentation, or else make the distribution copy of
the documentation vague so that it can apply to all sites. This would
require some rewriting, but it probably wouldn't be as big a deal
(either way).
I had this idea to go along with it -- I don't know how feasible it is
or whether the MW developers would want to use it, but... what if there
were another variable added that can be included inline with the wiki
text? I'm thinking of those items like "number of articles" or
"current date" and so forth. If another one of those were the website
name (already a variable for the web browser title bar), then the
variable could be used in place of referring to the website in any
documentation text, and thus would *automatically* be updated.
I suppose this all assumes that the people who are using the software
want to start out with the same established policies that Wikipedia
currently uses, but from my perspective, that's exactly what I'm trying
to do, at least in the initial stages of the site's growth.
Thanks,
Dan Carlson
Administrator, Memory Alpha
http://memoryalpha.st-minutiae.com/