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philipacamaniac
April 27th, 2005, 04:21 PM
Is it just me, or is the Official Wiki (http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki) not very well organized or user friendly? I'm not trying to be mean, and I am more than willing to help.

Here are some ideas that I think would help a lot.

1. Create a categorical system (Installation, Networking, etc.) and don't show sub-pages within a category until you browse to that category's page.

2. Setup Wiki Creation Guidelines, which specify how a particular Wiki page should look and what category it should be placed into, and how it should be titled. Here's a start - "Use spaces between words when giving your page a title."

3. Setup Wiki templates, so that when a user wants to create a "How to tune your kernel" wiki, they can start with an approriate How-To template. That way, all the How-To documents look uniform.

4. Create stub articles (placeholders without any information) so that new authors have an idea of what to work on.

5. Put in a system to feature pages and how-to documents on the front page, much like Wikipedia's "Featured Article".



That's it! That would make a great Ubuntu Wiki. Of course, that's on the webmaster end of it. But it is up to the users to integrate the How-To "Customization" forum and the Official Wiki. Here is what we need to do:

1. When you create a successful How-to thread in the "Customization" forum, transfer the information to a wiki page. Be sure to include any changes or corrections made in the discussion thread of your How-to. In the new Wiki article, provide a link for the original discussion thread of that how-to topic, so that users can very easily make comments without having to edit the Wiki directly.

sethmahoney
April 27th, 2005, 05:34 PM
I don't know if anybody is working on it now, but it might be a good idea to copy the HOWTOs on the Ubuntu forums to the wiki.

HungSquirrel
April 27th, 2005, 06:49 PM
2. Setup Wiki Creation Guidelines, which specify how a particular Wiki page should look and what category it should be placed into, and how it should be titled. Here's a start - "Use spaces between words when giving your page a title."
I notice this in a lot of wikis. I don't know if it's a convention or a design flaw, but dammit, I only like to see internal capitalization when I'm writing code.

sas
April 27th, 2005, 07:44 PM
I notice this in a lot of wikis. I don't know if it's a convention or a design flaw, but dammit, I only like to see internal capitalization when I'm writing code.
It's convention because some wiki software requires the page name is CamelCase i believe...wikka wiki and wakka wiki do.....i've not used any others...

philipacamaniac
April 27th, 2005, 08:19 PM
Well maybe we can convince Canonical to migrate to MediaWiki (http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/), so that such conventions are no longer a problem.

Some really usable MediaWiki sites (other than WikiPedia and friends):

http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page
http://gentoo-wiki.com/Main_Page
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

philipacamaniac
April 27th, 2005, 09:07 PM
I did some research, and it looks like official Wiki is running Plone (www.plone.org). If you go to Plone's documentation site (http://plone.org/documentation/helpcenter_view) then you will see that even when running Plone you can still have a nice usable wiki/documentation site.

So nevermind about MediaWiki, but I do think that Ubuntulinux.org should adopt some of my suggestions to change the Wiki.

jnoreiko
April 28th, 2005, 10:47 AM
One thing that is confusing about the wiki is that some documents are in the main site, and some are on the wiki. Eg the Ubuntu FAQ. Is the wiki meant to be only a rough workshop area for documentation?

Another thing is that not all pages are in the same syntax. I recently tried to convert the FAQ page from the rather confusing restructured text syntax to the wiki syntax, and it wasn't easy.

Switching to MediaWiki would be a good idea.

For one thing, the wiki syntaxt we're using (moin, I think) is pretty awkward for things such as lists. Granted, there is no "standard" wiki syntax, but the MediaWiki version is becoming the de facto, simply because of Wikipedia's size and prominence.