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

[Monahon, Peter B.]

> Dave wrote: ... Programmers who do not, can 
> not or will not document haven't earned their 
> chops.  If someone is coding a system to track 
> their groceries at home and they don't want to 
> document then fine.  Any time someone is
> working on any system, open-source, 
> closed-source, free-ware or charge-ware, 
> documentation is part of the job ...

Thanks, Dave, nice reminder that "the job's not finished until the
paperwork's done" (toilet humor).

Sadly, I find writing, documentation, incredibly difficult, and for at
least the first 10 revisions, my writing reads myopic and seems
understandable only by me.  (Is anyone really surprised?)  But, "writing
is rewriting," and therein lies the rub.  I think much of what
documentation I've read so far on MediaWiki and extensions is
first-draft stuff.  C'mon, people, in a Wiki world, aren't we
accelerating to the 10th revision toute suite?  I guess not!

I'm also reading Microsoft's offering on technical help documentation:

"Microsoft Manual of Style"

Book $$: <<http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/6074.aspx>> or
http://tinyurl.com/3yrbnj 

<<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Manual_of_Style_for_Technical_P
ublications>> or http://tinyurl.com/38ryfu 

Download free: 

<<http://www.vanossy.de/download.php?id=1090295,49,1&PHPSESSID=61c8e22f7
ce7e849eba2c97094839338>> or http://tinyurl.com/kqjmj  

See also their HTML help authoring system - free:

<<http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/htmlh
elp/html/hwMicrosoftHTMLHelpDownloads.asp>> or http://tinyurl.com/3nznp 

There's way more at Microsoft, much of it free.  IBM used to publish
something like this for PC user software submissions (when we used 5
1/4" floppies, and Microsoft was the "little guy"!).  I went to 3-day
RoboHelp training $$$ but it was all about operating the software, not
generating accurate and comprehendible content!  I find the hardest part
to write succinctly and unambiguously is digging to find the specific
"...by doing what..." part of the report.  And then testing it.  Almost
every time I finally get some documentation to accurately represent the
behavior of my system, I walk it to another system and invariably it
fails there.  

Argh.  Starting over ...

So, I know exactly what I'm asking for when I ask if there are "Any
leads on a basic wiki setup-and-configure instruction manual?"

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

... is excellent, but NOT a troubleshooter's guide nor an exhaustive
reference on MediaWiki ownership, which for me means not only a complete
inventory of parts needed to build one, but also how to back up and
restore and migrate and import and export your precious data all by
itself regardless of the replaceable shell components.  I presume we're
still on our own to synthesize all that from various other MySQL and PHP
references along with whatever MediaWiki and extensions documentation we
can scrounge up on our own.

Now if I can just get Google on fire with this idea.  I LOVE to
subcontract my work (oh, sorry, was that yelling?).

- Peter Blaise