[Foundation-l] New MediaWiki documentation effort

[Erik Moeller]

-> PLEASE TRANSLATE THIS MESSAGE INTO YOUR LANGUAGE AND SEND A COPY TO  
YOUR LOCAL PROJECT MAILING LIST. THANK YOU!

MediaWiki is a great software package, but in one department it is  
lacking: documentation. In spite of the collaborative power of wiki, so  
far there exists no single user documentation. Instead, each project  
maintains its own fork, and the Meta pages are one big mess (although the  
English documentation has become a bit better with the introduction of the  
Help: namespace).

I have just taken live some code changes which allow us to finally  
systematically document MediaWiki. I have added code to allow custom  
namespaces, so that any wiki can have any number of namespaces beyond the  
ordinary ones. Using this, I have then created namespaces in the largest  
languages (for which I had translations of "Help" and "Help talk") on
http://meta.wikimedia.org . See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents
for a list of available namespaces.

That means you can now edit Hilfe:Inhalt or Aide:Aide like the English  
users have been editing Help:Contents. Why is that important? Because it  
allows us to easily export all the help files in one language, and import  
them into another wiki.

Any wiki may want to make custom changes to the help pages. This is best  
done using custom header and footer templates. Interlanguage links should  
also be passed to a template as a parameter, so that users who only import  
one translation can hide them easily (by removing the parameter).

I have laid out some basic editorial guidelines for working on pages in  
the Help: namespace of your language:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents

This also includes a modified Template:Hc which shows how interlanguage  
links can work.

The gist of it is that we must make sure that the pages in the namespace  
can be imported by *any project*, Wikimedia or not, without changes  
(except to a handful of templates).

Once the pages have stabilized, we should clean out the Help: namespaces  
of all Wikimedia projects and import the meta pages instead. We can then  
upgrade them regularly (even daily) and automatically on all wikis.

The project namespace ("Wikipedia:", "Wikisource:" etc.) should then be  
used strictly for policy.

I propose that the Help: namespace be used both for user and  
administration documentation (installation guidelines etc.), so we can  
move towards a single neatly integrated handbook.

I invite all interested parties to participate in consolidating our  
documentation.

Regards,

Erik