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

[Monahon, Peter B.]

> Roger wrote: ... I just now started a page 
> to document MediaWiki user interface 
> customization. You can help write this page:
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interface

Thanks, Roger.  

Great start.  Now, where's the MediaWiki "table of contents" scheme into
which your "Manual:Interface" page fits? Searching MediaWiki.org for
"interface" brings up: 1st =
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:User_interface ... nope ...
skipping all the unrelated noise ... 40th(!) =
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Navigation_bar ... some relevance
... and so on!  I didn't look further.  How would anybody find
Manual:Interface?

I searched for "manual" and get the "manual" page at
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual ... which has NO table of contents
for any "manual" for MediaWiki.  Doh!  Likewise
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Manual ... but
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Flat_namespace contains this
thoughtful tease from http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rogerhc (hey,
that's also you!):

"...  * Flat namespaces are easier to navigate, * The fewer levels of
hierarchy the better when dealing with collaboration, * People can't
collaborate if they can't find what they are looking for ... An
encyclopedia is a classic flat namespace.  So is a dictionary.  The
names of pages in MediaWiki.org are not encyclopedic nor dictionary like
because the topic of MediaWiki is narrow and deep, not shallow and wide
like an encyclopedia or dictionary.  So keeping the page namespace on
MediaWiki.org flat and easy to navigate is not as easy as keeping the
page namespace of Wikipedia.org or Wiktionary.org flat.  But the need to
keep taxonomic hierarchy on MediaWiki.org as simple as possible and flat
as practical is important.  It is management of information complexity.
Subpages may hurt site usability more than help because it can be hard
for newcomers to guess where in the hierarchy something can be found and
hard for veteran users to remember how to type out the exact hierarchy
under which a page is located.  Categories and other labels should be
kept as short as possible so that bunches remain easy to read and
navigate at a glance and individual instances remain easy to type from
memory into a page...."

Hmm ... easy to navigate a flat space?  In what city do you live?!?  ;-)
In the real world, I drive my car on a linear (not flat) surface of the
globe, but I use a reference road map to find destinations and plan my
trip, I have many ways to search through preview resources, and I also
have alternative ways to get from point A to point B: air, ground,
water.  I don't see such resources in MediaWiki's "simple" search and no
automatic meta table of contents.  

Special:Allpages is a start, but only brings up pages in the "Main"
namespace, right?  But, at MediaWiki.org, there's also: Talk, User, User
talk, Project, Project talk, Image, Image talk, MediaWiki, MediaWiki
talk, Template, Template talk, Help, Help talk, Category, Category talk,
Manual, Manual talk, Extension, Extension talk!  18 additional
namespaces where disconnected pieces and parts of any "MediaWiki
setup-and-configure instruction manual" may lay!  

Does anyone know how to really list ALL Allpages - as that might be a
great place to start building a total table of contents that grabs and
organizes such disparate pages as are scattered across, say,
"Manual:..." and "Project:..." and so on, all related in content, but
not related any other way?  Someone at
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project_talk:Support_desk#MediaWiki_Overvi
ew_-_database_structure asked what the MediaWiki/MySQL database
structure looks like,  and the answer is elsewhere at
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Database_layout.  How do we plan to
coordinate such disparate contents from "Project talk" and "Manual:nnn"
... and make it findable and easy to navigate?!?   

If anyone thinks the "search" box is the answer, they're dreaming!  Why
do we think there's such scattered info as it is?  Because the "search"
box results are not very sophisticated.  I've expanded mine to show:
Hits per page: 100, Lines per hit: 20, Context per line: 100, and I scan
the entire list before giving up.  Is anyone else that patient with the
MediaWiki "search" feature results before Googling, instead?

In the computer resource world, I'm used to controlled vocabulary
hierarchies like http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/.  Photography is
my second language, and I have thousands of image files to catalog and
share, so hierarchies like "cat is under animal and mammal and domestic
and color and date and location" are no problem for me and any
relational database to manage .. hey, isn't MediaWiki built on a
relational database?

I guess when I'm looking for the pieces and parts of "...a basic wiki
setup-and-configure instruction manual...", analogies like "road map"
overview are also appropriate.

However, one of us is going to have to write an exhaustive, hierarchical
table of contents for all those pieces and parts of MediaWiki
setup-and-configure instruction manual we find all over the place,
combine duplicates, identify gaps.  I'm just not experienced enough to
see MediaWiki clearly through what for me is still quite thick fog.
Does anybody else have a sense of how to impose a structure on the vast
resources at MediaWiki.org?

-- Peter Blaise (see
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Peterblaise for my
paltry contributions so far, mostly just questions!)