[Typo3-doc] Wiki people: who's on board now?

[virgil huston]

Alex makes excellent points about the wiki for TYPO3 documentation. My
comment is a bit more basic. It kind of bothers me that a TYPO3
repository is not run by TYPO3 software. If there is a way to set up a
nice document repository using only TYPO3, I am all for that.

As for wikis, I have never liked their open nature for 'official'
documentation. Quality control is extremely difficult. I wuld like to
see a system where recommended changes are submitted to the doc team,
reviewed and incorporated (or not), then published. The public at
large should not be able to change them.

Virgil

On 11/2/05, Alex Heizer <alex at tekdevelopment.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Peter had asked me to take up maintenance tasks on the T3 wiki, but to
> date I haven't received any admin login info. I've begun "watching" the
> pages, but with 533 articles, and >1700 pages, it takes quite a bit of
> time to manually "watch" each page, adding them to my list one at a
> time. This brings up some concerns/ideas/questions about the t3 wiki,
> and its possible role in the future. But let me clarify that there is an
> amazing amount of documentation on the wiki, and a lot of hard work has
> already been done! My concerns are only with using a wiki to support an
> entire documentation catalog, compared with other documentation
> cataloging systems.
>
> Let me say first that the wiki is an attractive way of presenting
> information, so that is definitely a good thing. Plus, it provides a
> good place to work on documentation for proofreading. However, I have
> some reservations about using a wiki, in general, as a final destination
> for documentation. I've held off on the reservations until I have had a
> good chance to go through our wiki in specific, and I think we can come
> up with good ways to overcome these limitations.
>
> 1. Navigation is all-manual. In order to have a page show up as a link,
> aside from the Main Page, it needs to be manually placed, linked and
> maintained.
> 2. Anyone can alter the text at any time. This is good for people to add
> documentation easily, but with 1700+ pages and no way to globally watch
> each current and new page, constant monitoring can get difficult.
> 3. Once text is in the wiki, it is in the wiki. If we want to offer an
> OpenOffice or DocBook version to developers or a PDF version for
> download, that is extra effort that must be duplicated each time. This
> becomes a proportional effort to update each version when the wiki is
> updated.
> 4. I am not sure how "portable" the wiki is, as far as if we decide to
> move the existing wiki, wholesale, to a new wiki system. This may be a
> simple export that an admin can do, but it's a concern since I don't
> have admin access to the wiki yet.
>
> For a final documentation system, there are many advantages to the
> current "write in OpenOffice, export to PDF and pull into a document
> site" workflow model, but I also see ways to improve what we currently
> have. The documentation repository could be better organized, styled
> more attractively (it's not bad now, just a little clumsy here and
> there), set up for better PDF generation, and so on.
>
> Making the documentation easy for as many people as possible to locate
> relevant information will be important to changing people's mindsets
> from "TYPO3 is a great Open Source project" to "TYPO3 is a great Content
> Management System". So how can we take what we already have and make it
> so that we can offer the widest amount of formats for the same
> information, make it as easy as possible for people to locate what they
> are looking for, and do it with the least amount of duplicated effort on
> the part of doc maintainers (including the doc teams)? I am thinking
> that with the above limitations, the current wiki isn't going to let us
> do that, but would there be a possibility that we could use another
> system that can generate the wiki content the same way that typo3.org
> can automatically generate website content and PDFs both from an Open
> Office document?
>
> What are the possibilities?
>
> Alex