I was thinking of having it far more optional, right down to a check
box on the installer page - "Install Help namespace content". While
we'd perhaps provide a script to update it as altered forms of the
documentation were made available, we'd prevent said script from
overwriting existing pages in the wiki.
I'm not sure about all the linking to/from Meta, however, aside from
for the Wikimedia wikis, and some of those will want to use customised
documentation.
Of course, the simpler option again is to provide an XML dump of some
help namespace content, e.g. from
MediaWiki.org. Administrators on the
destination wikis could import that with few difficulties, after all.
Rob Church
On 05/01/06, Sy Ali <sy1234(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 1/4/06, Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com>
wrote:
Rob Church wrote:
Brion: Couldn't we adapt the script that
populates the MediaWiki
namespace to do the actual adding to the wiki upon installation, if
the administrator opts for this? Or at least, duplicate it, rename it,
and tweak it for this particular purpose.
Sure, if there were something to fill it with.
So basically what would need to happen is a separate space would need
to be carved out somewhere, and then documents would have to be
hand-migrated to that documentation-wiki. This project would have to
then appropriately label the licenses and then volunteers would have
to rewrite the non-pd documentation into the public domain.
This wiki's help data would then need to be bundled up as a
documentation package either included with or separately
downloadable.. and it would be either inserted by the installer or
installed by the administrator (i.e. some sort of importable thing, or
mysql dump or the like).
This wiki would be the "master" and various wikimedia projects would
import it or link to it. The hope would be to have people go to the
one reference wiki to make changes.
It all seems really messy to me, unless there is a way to have this
documentation data automatically synced between multiple wikis. And
while you're there, it would be nice if edits on any of those wikis
automatically propagated to every other wiki.. but that's blue-sky.
=/
Even if that documentation bundle was ready right now, there is no way
for another wiki to import it all and then to mark every page in their
help section to indicate that what is seen locally is just a copy of
the official documentation-wiki version. This would be necessary to
warn people to go to the source wiki to make changes and that any
local changes could be overwritten without warning by a future import.
I recently posted a feature request which would cover this use
(per-section announcements)
As an aside, maybe such documentation would be better in its own
private namespace, to not conflict with Help?
Just brainstorming..
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