[Mediawiki-l] Any leads on a basic wiki setup-and-configure instruction manual?

Tue Apr 10 19:44:14 UTC 2007

Peter,

I believe that the book will answer a lot of the questions you have
mentioned.  It has a pretty good explanation of namespaces and
categories.  By the way they are basic ways to 'organize' bits.

The online "documentation" is good but there are holes.  You just have
to keep looking, searching and asking "why?".

Generally this works well.

As for the hats, that is the least of the problems <G>

DSig
David Tod Sigafoos | SANMAR Corporation
PICK Guy
206-770-5585
davesigafoos at sanmar.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: mediawiki-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Monahon,
Peter B.
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 12:33
To: mediawiki-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Any leads on a basic wiki setup-and-configure
instruction manual?

> "Fred wrote: There are few things regarding 
> any open source software that can't be figured 
> out by using some creative googling. Fred

Great speculation, Fred.  Yes, we Googled and found a *book* (no web
sites) that at least one person on this list has used and found to be
supportive of the types of inquiries and problems I shared:

    http://www.packtpub.com/MediaWiki/book 
    "MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide" 
    by Mizanur Rahman.

I'll let you all know how it works for me.  Thank you, Chad and Dave! 
Aside: Dave, "How can anyone be expected to run a catalog with 79 (!!!)
different baseball cap styles?"
to paraphrase Charles de Gaulle - see
http://sanmar.com/sanmar-servlets/CatalogBrowser?v=new&id=126

However, regarding the specific MediaWiki struggles I shared, I've found
no satisfactory Google responses yet.  I said so in my first post, but
the admin quashed it.  Too long?  Some other discomfort?  Who knows why
my first post was rejected by the list-serve admin.  So, instead, I
re-wrote a shorter inquiry.  Now, we can endlessly guess at what details
I originally offered to share up front in this thread.  Any other
guesses from others?

Angela, Thank you very much for offering your experience and insight,
details in response to the 4 samples of the type of challenges I'm
experiences.  However, I either cannot even get to the screens you
describe as working for you, or I cannot produce the results you imply
should be available or that I want to accomplish.  I appreciate your
trying, but short of on-site troubleshooting, I don't think either of us
knows exactly where our attempt to coordinate goes awry.  

Here's an example of my frustration finding MediaWiki documentation:
What are "Categories" and why?
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Categories is meaningless to me since
it does not explain what [Category] is used for, how it works, what are
it's features and benefits.  It's like teaching someone how to drive a
car and explaining the steering wheel like this: "turn the steering
wheel by rotating clockwise or anticlockwise".  Hello, isn't there
something missing in that?  Such as: it's attached to a rolling car and
you actually want to move forward or backward AND change general
direction to get to a destination, probably on roads of some kind?  So,
I'd like to know what I can do with Category schemes.  Can I easily
design a Category scheme later in life and apply it with a macro,
globally?  Or, do I have to manually categorize each page?  Can I
categorize by selecting from a schematic clickable menu I build on my
site?

NOWHERE on that page (above) is there a link to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory and I would not have found
more had I not exited from MediaWiki/WikiMedia altogether and wandered
around Google a bit.  But, Fred, please note that the two Category
articles I found here are TOTALLY UNRELATED to each other and absolutely
no help in intelligently planning and building and maintaining and
rebuilding a MediaWiki implementation using Categories.

So, I search WITHIN Wikipedia for [how to use wiki categories] and it
barfs up nothing, suggesting that I jump ship into Google or Yahoo
search.  I graciously accept Google and find ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization  (which Wikipedia
couldn't find on it's own?) which also leads me to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization_FAQ !

I answer my own question:

"No."

Remember the question?

"Any leads on a basic wiki setup-and-configure instruction manual?"

So, I'm printing my own, including further reading on Categories at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy ... this has  l-o-n-g  day written
all over it!

I'll read the book mentioned above and continue to print and read
hundreds of web reference pages daily, and continue to develop, develop,
develop.  My US TMEP Wiki Project is up to ~569,072 words, ~4,593
[Edit]able headings, and it all fits on a 125mb USB flash drive WITH
Apache, MySQL, PHP and more using WOS for development  (WOS from
Cornelius Herzog at http://www.chsoftware.net/en, thank you very much)!

- Peter Blaise

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