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

[Matteo Anceschi]

Hi Alex,

first of all thank you for your effort :)

Il 03/11/05 0.34, Alex Heizer ha scritto:
> 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.

I agree, there's already a lot of very good documentation.
My concerns instead are to make the structure of the wiki logical, 
usable and friendly.
I do few examples: how can we think that t3 wiki it will be 
user-friendly when near all the user comments are made on the _article_ 
pages and not on the talk pages (this is the natural place for them)?
You think about a "wiki-clone" of the documentation matrix? I disagree: 
yes, I want to have this, for sure :)
But: here I'd like to see snippets, suggests, a lot of other things.
I have a lot of similar thughts, but obviously I wait for "guidelines 
from the top", actually I'm only a wiki-user :)



> 
> 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.
> 

Remember: we're limitated by the Mediawiki version.
For example, from Mediawiki 1.4.8 (I'm not sure, but it's surely the 
case of current Mediawiki version), we can use "patrolling": so we can 
offer to end-user the last "manually revised" version of a page, instead 
of the "real last version" (meta.wikimedia.org do this)

> 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.

Yes. If you mean that we have to surround a word with [[]] to make it a 
link, yes.
But there's not too many maintenance: we wrote a set of naming 
conventions for pages, and all it's very quick ("wiki") :)

> 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.

Yes, it's an effort. But theree's a difference between wikipedia: you 
can't do "monkey typing" with typoscript: if there's a vandale, it's 
self-evident, but if there's a contibution with correct syntax, we can 
rely on (but also we have to verify this later, surely)

> 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.

Yes. This is the big question: the Typo3 "top management" thinks about 
the wiki as a clone of documentation or not?
THis is a consideration for, I think, we need a good feedback from them.

> 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.

I used wiki system and read a lot about them. Mediawiki is surely the 
better implementation and idea now available...in my opinion, obviously :)
For admin access: I think things will change, isn't it? ;) However, I'm 
already admin on it.wikipedia.org and I've few more "powers" than a 
common user, but perhaps this is related also with the mediawiki version 
we use.

> 
> 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.

I agree, but the question remains the same: what is the role of the 
wiki? Documentation matrix clone?

> 
> 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?

On wikipedia, we (not I, but obviously in general) use conversion tools, 
and I think Sylvain  had a look on them: 
http://wiki.typo3.org/index.php/User:Sylvain#Documentation_related_tools_.28freeware.29
I think also that if there's a possibility in the nera future to see a 
OO-Wiki conversion tool, it will be for mediawiki. The activity around 
mediawiki is huge regarding the other wiki systems.

> 
> What are the possibilities?
> 
> Alex

Alex, I repeat once more (for devs who read, not in particular for you): 
we need guidelines for the general role of T3 wiki, or (if this is the 
decision) someone has to tell us "do what you think better". I think 
that before adding thing or features, we need a direction.

Thank you in advance...and contact me whenever you want :)

Cheers,
Matteo


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