[Mediawiki-l] How Critical is Initial Designing ?

Anders Wegge Jakobsen wegge at wegge.dk
Thu Feb 3 19:27:15 UTC 2005


"skill2die4" == skill2die4  <skill2die4 at secguru.com> writes:

> Wiki is very different from the rest of the web technologies, and
> impressive too ;-)

> I am currently looking at the possiblity of using wiki for my
> upcoming site, which would be like online documentation.  However, i
> am going crazy over the design stuff ... eg..  should i make this
> category or a section , this and that...

> So, my questions to peers who are already using wiki is that how
> difficult it is to change the orientation of your site once you get
> started. What is the general practise : start small and keep
> changing stuff , or make a well designed skeleton and then add to
> it.

 My 2 bits of advice:

 * Start early. It's relatively easy to move pages and reassign
   categories later on, if you want to structure things in another
   way. I've found myself in situations where a page that started as a
   small bit of information has grown to the point where it in fact
   was more of a category. In those cases, I've split the page content
   to severral subpages, added them to the same category. The original
   page now contains the first paragraph from each of the subpages and
   a link to the rest of the text. That works fine for me, as it's an
   easy way of doing Top-down design. 

 * Set up a private wiki, where you can experiment with radical
   changes. I have a similar setup, and i load a database backup from
   my public wiki on the test installation every so often. By doing
   so, it's easy to experiment on live data without risks.

-- 
/Wegge <http://wiki.wegge.dk>
echo mail: !#^."<>"|tr "<> mail:" dk at wegge
mailto:awegge at gmail.com - Invitationer på FCFS basis



More information about the MediaWiki-l mailing list