[Mediawiki-l] Downloadable MediaWiki documentation

[Rick DeNatale]

On 1/3/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> MediaWiki, alas, "ships" with a blank Help namespace. I'm hoping,
> myself, that we can at some point start shipping with content; alas,
> most of it needs to be rewritten and released under the GPL or a
> compatible license, so that it can be included with the software.

When I look at wikipedia, meta etc, they all seem to claim that the
content is licensed under the GFDL.  Is this really an issue?

> I'm working on that, when I have time - which is not a lot. You might
> have noticed the newer, cleaner FAQ at
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:FAQ.
>
> Anyone else want to give a hand sorting out some documentation? Ought
> we to get a few people from the main projects involved writing it,
> perhaps?

Good stuff, but I think that the stuff on meta is targetted to those
of us who install and customize mediawiki.  What I and a lot of others
who are running mediawiki based wiki servers would like is the level
of user documentation available to users of wikipedia, which has a lot
of help and tutorial info in the help and project namespaces.

All of that material claims to be available under the GFDL.  The
problem is that there isn't a good way to 'port' it to another wiki. 
One problem is how to copy it without a lot of effort; another is that
it needs to be editted to change references to wikipedia in the text
which need changing, while (probably) keeping page links to most
wikipedia articles in the main namespace as inter-wiki links.

Then there's the problem of separating out and dealing with the policy
articles which need to be adapted and/or replaced on other wikis.

Some time ago I went through considerable effort to manually adapt
quite a bit of the wikipedia tutorial/help material for my own wiki.
Unfortunately even after that effort, I don't have anything which is
easily shared with others.

--
Rick DeNatale

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