Wiki focus - user versus developer documentation

Marko Knöbl openmoko.marko at gmail.com
Fri Aug 29 19:29:39 CEST 2008


2008/8/29 Michael Shiloh <michael at openmoko.org>:
>
>
> Minh Ha Duong wrote:
>> I very much agree with Michael: Ben's idea has legs, it's going to go far.
>>
>> What do you know about the namespaces in wikimedia ?
>> I just read
>>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Namespace
>>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Namespace
>>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Custom_namespaces
>> and wonder if it would be a good idea to use them to
>> separate User-oriented from Devs-oriented pages.
>>
>> In summary, namespaces:
>> - allows separation of different kinds of unrelated content; several
>> namespaces have special features related to their intended purpose
>> - allows unrelated content to be stored in one wiki, but requires lots of
>> extra typing
>> - provides facilities to limit searches to a particular area
>> - in principle allows easy exporting (but not with the Export feature, which
>> is for selected individual pages) of a selection of work (categories could
>> also be used for this more cleanly)
>> - allows for feature separation
>>
>> *  They can be detected by the CSS and so we can have subtle visual
>> differences (on Blender's site they are perhaps too subtle).
>> * Implementing namespaces requires administrator intervention. The
>> Blender-style "prefix/" solution is probably fully userland.
>>
>> Any comments ?
>
> Sounds interesting. Truth be told, I've often seen the "namespace"
> option when searching wikis (not ours), and I've never really found it
> terribly useful. But that may be just me.
>
> Another point: The reason for this thread is to help developers v.s.
> users. If users are the less sophisticated, they are less likely to
> understand and use the namespace feature.
>
>
> And as you point out it requires admin. Our admins are terribly
> overloaded. I say keep our requests to them to a minimum.
>
> I suggest for now that for pages that have a user or developer
> perspective we use the categories. The page names will probably be
> different as well. We can always do a mass conversion later if the
> categories are correct.
>
> This will also require a redesign of our front page. Do any of you feel
> like mocking up how that might look?
>
> Thanks again Ben! Good idea. And thanks to all of you for your feedback
> and continued help.
>
> Michael
>
>
>>
>> Two direct questions to Openmoko:
>> *  There is a custom namespace already, Openmoko: Which kind of pages are
>> supposed go in it ?
>> * Same question with the  Help:  namespace ?
>>
>> Minh
>>
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By using an extension of MediaWiki it's possible to create custom
search boxes (like the Help search on Wikipedia [1]), so I think there
won't be a problem with the usability. I really like the idea of
having namespaces on our wiki because its content is so diverse.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents



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