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

[Alex Heizer]

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


Matteo Anceschi wrote:

>Hi to all,
>as I wrote on dev list [1], I'm an admin on italian wikipedia [2], and 
>until now the visible global handling of T3 wiki (remember: I say 
>"visible", public) don't gave me enough motivation to help in this task. 
>Often a "normal user" has the distinct sensation well described by Peter 
>Kindstrom: "who really cares about it?"
>So I say: if the direction is "more partecipation, more coordination, 
>more attention", I want to give my help mantaining the T3 wiki as part 
>of documentation project.
>I've already started today the spam removal from all pages (in 
>alphabetical order).
>Then I've already in my mind few remarks over a lot of differences 
>(organizational and semantical) from wikipedia ( some perhaps better, 
>some perhaps worst :) ).
>Who I can tell about them?
>We're in a standing moment so it will be better to wait? :)
>
>Thank you again,
>Matteo
>
>
>
>
>[1]<mailman.1.1130496764.11074.typo3-dev at lists.netfielders.de>
>[2]http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:Ancem
>
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