[General] Updating the wiki

[Bryan Stearns]

I agree with the spirit of what Ted's saying (we need to stick to an 
organizational plan), but that's a static problem - we also have a 
dynamic problem, and that's that there's a lot of out-of-date chaff on 
the wikis that hamper any attempts to find the wheat. (It's been pointed 
out before that the built-in wiki search is useless - Google is 
marginally better, mostly because it's faster; there's still way too 
many useless results.

Case in point: I wrote a dev-list message this morning about our checkin 
process; while writing, I looked for documentation of our process, and 
found out-of-date pages by Michael Toy and Ducky long before I found the 
"current" info.

This problem won't be solved without a wiki gardener; even if we get rid 
of half the chaff now (a huge effort), we'll still be having this same 
discussion again in a year or so. See previous wiki redesign announcements:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.osaf.devel/1205/match=wiki
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.osaf.devel/739/match=wiki
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.osaf.design/2988/match=wiki
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.osaf.devel/3188/match=wiki
...

...Bryan


Ted Leung wrote:
> In my view, the single biggest problem that we are facing is the 
> actual organization of the content on the wiki(s).   That's the 
> problem that Mimi and I were trying to solve with the information 
> hierarchy that  was previously developed on this list: 
> <http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/WikiReTaxonomy>.   
> Lots of people's input was incorporated into that taxonomy.    No 
> matter which wiki software we use or which features it has, we are 
> still going to be bumping up against this problem.   Every day we see 
> questions about where to find some piece of information that was 
> previously recorded in the wiki.    As far as I can tell, the only 
> people who seem to be efficient at using the wiki are people who go to 
> the same (small) set of pages over and over, or people (like me) who 
> have a customized list of entry points 
> <http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/TedLeung20060824> to 
> useful pages.
>
> Ted
>
> On Sep 18, 2006, at 10:09 AM, Priscilla Chung wrote:
>
>> We're trying to kick start the wiki project again. First I'd like to 
>> ask everyone to answer the following:
>>
>> + What features do people like about the current wiki?
>> + What features are missing from the current wiki?
>>
>> Here are my examples. Please copy and paste in your answers:
>>
>> + What features do people like about the current wiki?
>>
>> 1. The page loading are fairly quick–I use checkpoint a lot.
>> 2. The editor is simple. Easy to use, easy to find. As long as you're 
>> not doing anything to complicated.
>> 3. Finding the Cosmo project page (which is the pages I'm in the 
>> most) is on the left nav and fairly easy to find.
>>
>> + What features are missing from the current wiki?
>>
>> 1. Information hierarchy problem and I cannot locate pages directly 
>> when I need them.
>> 2. If you want to do something a bit more complicated in the WYSIWYG 
>> editor, it starts to act funny. ie. adding tables.
>> 3. A better search engine. Difficulty finding pages. Maybe because 
>> there is an OSAF site, OSAF blog, wiki, bugzilla and addition HTML 
>> pages for specs??
>>
>> -Priscilla
>>
>>
>>
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