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%27s_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'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%27s_Guide), 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%27s_Guide), 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.
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?
Greetings, -asb