[IAEP] Wiki reorganization proposal

[David Farning]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 6:33 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

He has edited nearly 100 pages today, Yikes:)

> 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
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>>> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>