I think the main problem here is that you're seeing MediaWiki as a software platform designed like Quicken, with a single purpose in mind. MediaWiki is designed with a single purpose in mind, but that purpose is Wikipedia: The people who use the software for their own purposes are important too, but they're not what development is centered around. And since development comes from many directions and people, the focus tends to be on making the software work, not on making it orderly for people who are rummaging through it.
On 6/13/07, Monahon, Peter B. Peter.Monahon@uspto.gov wrote:
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?
I think I see why the information about MediaWiki is less-than-ideally organized: The people who are really interested in documenting things (like you) don't necessarily have much knowledge of or experience with the software, and the people who really know a lot about it (like Rob Church) would rather be working on the software than writing documentation for it. If you really want to change this, then you're going to have to unite the two parts, either by learning enough about MediaWiki to document all the things you want to document, or by getting the people who really know the software well to help you. Judging by the responses to your emails, it doesn't seem like those people are going to jump forth and help you along every step of the way, so I'd suggest you start poring through every bit of documentation you can find, whether on Wikipedia, meta.wikimedia.org, mediawiki.org, the software files (/includes/DefaultSettings.php has a lot of neat stuff), third party how-tos (there seem to be all sorts of articles scattered through the web on various MediaWiki subjects, if you do a Google search), existing MediaWiki implementations, and anywhere else you can think of. I've been running a wiki for a year now (with some previous experience as an end-user), and I think I have a pretty good grasp of most of the visible concepts of the software; I don't know nearly as much as I'd like about all the code and whirring gears that make everything work, but you don't necessarily need to know all about that to document things as a sysadmin.
If the idea of transforming yourself into a MediaWiki guru so that you can restructure the documentation is too daunting, then you should abandon your visionary approach, find the specific tasks you need to do, get the help (paid or otherwise) you need to accomplish them, and document your methods as you go.
Good luck, whatever you decide.