[IAEP] Wiki reorganization proposal

[Walter Bender]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 6:14 PM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> If I were to do it all again, I would make the teams into namespaces:)
>
> The challange of a wiki is that there are three distinct use case:
> -Writing
> -Editing
> -Reading
>
> The use of teams (or name spaces) help prevent sprawl.  Often, in
> wikis we find that writers pick a random name for their new pages.  As
> a result there can be several half finished pages on the some topic.
>
> When editors come along and attempt to merge similar pages, they need
> to be aware of the whole wiki before they can be effective.
>
> Then when readers come acoss the wiki then need to be able to quickly
> find the information for which they are looking.
>
> The idea for the limited number of base categories came from Fedora's
> experience with their wiki.  They found that without the use of
> hierarchy the wiki quickly sprawled into a very difficult to use mess.
>  Thus, they formed a number of base catagories.  Wiki gardeners can
> then maintain a subsection of pages.
>
> I don't think anyone outside of Wikipedia, who's information is
> naturally arranged in alphabetical order, has found a good solution to
> the problem.

2¢

I would argue that it is irrelevant that the Wikipedia entires can be
alphabetized. Has anyone ever used that to navigate? It is a generally
a flat hierarchy given the nature of the content; the key is a decent
search engine and a culture of linking within pages. They also make
extensive use of themed templates to tie together related concepts.
The hierarchy of the pages themselves is not particularly relevant to
the reader or the editor.

That said, our content is not the same as the Wikipedia. It is far
from uniform and it is serving a variety of needs, from documentation
to news to meeting notes to task lists, all across a variety of tasks.
I think the Team structure is serving us well and Fred Grose has been
adding/updating the tags. Enabling better search by eliminating
CamelCase is probably the most important single action we could have
taken.

But the power is in the link. Link your pages to other pages. Link to
your page from other pages.

-walter

> david
>
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 2:56 PM, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think navigation would be easier if the large majority of pages were moved
>> out of their camel-case subpage position (DevelopmentTeam/ProjectIdeas) to a
>> more simple wikipedia-style name (Project ideas). We would use team
>> categories for organization. We could still get the same "subpage links" as
>> currently by transcluding the category (and having any category intro text
>> as a <noinclude>). The only pages that would stay as subpages would be
>> internal-business pages like TODO and Mission, which have the same name and
>> different content for each project.
>>
>> What do people think?
>>
>> Jameson
>>
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>>
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>



-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org