Wiki Editing Guidelines

Harald Welte laforge at openmoko.org
Tue Feb 20 15:28:01 CET 2007


On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 01:58:38PM +0000, Ole Tange wrote:
> On 2/19/07, Harald Welte <laforge at openmoko.org> wrote:
> 
> >>From reviewing the 'Recent Changes', I have drafted a (currently still)
> >small list of rules for Wiki editing.  It is available at
> >http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/OpenMoko_Wiki_Editing_Guidelines
> 
> I like most of the guidelines.
> 
> I am not too happy about the Wishlist part, though. Putting "wishlist"
> in the title will imply that an idea can only have 2 states: Being on
> the wishlist or not. And that is not the case.
> 
> It is a continuum where an idea progresses from being just a wild idea
> to being a rock solid application.

I agree with you.

However, I would really like to see anything non-factual (or, let's say,
anything that is not on our 'official roadmap') to be clearly marked, if
not better in some specific section of the wiki only.  Or maybe in a
different wiki alltogether(!).  Please don't get me wrong, I appreciate
the creativity of all those suggestions.  But we cannot have more
suggestions/dreams/plans in the wiki than actual, "factual content". I
we run into that case, the wiki simply becomes irrelevant to people who
want to actually practically learn something about OpenMoko and/or the
supported devices.

This is really important not to confuse users.  Imagine somebody
googling for "GSM Phone" and "Wifi" and he ends up in our wiki on a page
that describes what wonderful things you can do with wifi on an [not
explicitly marked as imaginary] OpenEZX phone.  Now that person buys a
device, to only then find out that this is some wishlist/dream of
somebody.

It has to be clearly visible in the page itself.  One way of enforcing
tihs is to put it in the title.

> Also some of the pages will include ideas that have parts that could
> be implemented now, but that contains advanced options that requires,
> say, WiFi.

yes, this is why all that stuff should _actually_ be in some
ticket/issue tracking system, such as bugzilla.  Those systems can track
dependencies, as well as differentiate the current status of an item.

However, bug tracking systems usually cannot collaboratively change the
'bug description'. So ideally, things should mature in the wiki, and
only items with very detailed specification go into bugzilla wishlist
items.

I don't have a "golden solution" for this.  Maybe one can configure a
"Section" in the wiki, which has a slightly different layout/style, i.e.
that really optically differentiates.  We could then have a policy that
such 'dream' pages can only be linked from the "Dreams" main page, or
whatever.

-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at openmoko.org>          	        http://openmoko.org/
============================================================================
Software for the world's first truly open Free Software mobile phone




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