Re: Debian Wiki and wikihomepages
On Sat, 2009-03-07 at 18:30 +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
[..]
> > That could be interesting for Debian for DM/NM process. However the MOTU
> > pages aren't usual homepage but an application form.
>
> Yet, they are in the homepage namespace…
A page name like "wiki.u.c/JohnDoe/UniverseContributorApplication" is
almost a separate namespace (even though hierarchy is right to left).
This is a usual problem of hierarchical layout, i.e what is the best
page name: DebianInstaller/Team or Teams/DebianInstaller ? ;-)
> > > Consider this an experiment that concerns the NM team.
> >
> > 1. homepage aren't application for template.
> > 2. It would have been nice to ask on debian-www before hand (like
> > you would RM, ftpmaster... on various situation)
>
> Well, the wiki is the wiki, it's a very liberal tool used for many
> purposes and while I appreciate the work that you put into it,
> [..] I dislike the fact that you want to control all the wiki pages.
I know it's a problem I have (or I least I give that impression), and I
am working on it.
But every developer who grant commit access to a lot of contributors
knows the feeling.
When I got involved in the wiki, there was 3 different structure in the
wiki (i.e Frontpages...). If I didn't refrain some people from adding
their own structure, we would have 5 [incomplete] structures by now.
> For me, it's important that users have something useful/nice to browse
> when they start from the start page(s) but it's not a big deal if we have
> lots of unrelated pages because debian members use the wiki for all kinds
> of tasks.
I don't think people browse pages, they just search them.
Google knows what a good page is, google can figure out the ratio of
good and bad pages on a site. As far as I know the higher the ratio, the
higher google ranks each good page (which is sensible).
Currently, you often have wiki.d.o pages in the top 5 pages: "wireless
Debian", "webservers Debian", "lenny Debian", "debconf Debian", "hp
Debian", "T400 Debian"...
It wasn't the case 2 years ago.
<offtopic>
Unfortunately, "contribute Debian" isn't useful currently, but I hope
it's going to change with the futur frontpage
http://wiki.debian.org/FrontPageV3Sandbox
</offtopic>
> > > None of those reasons are very convincing.
> >
> > you mean that it isn't convincing to you.
>
> Let's review them:
> * People should be invited to contribute to official documentations rather
> that on the wiki
>
> What does that mean? You don't want help to maintain the wiki and we
> should push people towards debian-doc. Looks weird…
I mean that 99% of Debian's documentation is [and should remain] outside
the wiki, but people tend to duplicate the documentation here.
Maintaining the wiki is completely different from mere contribution.
That's not a job for new comers. Of course, newcomers can review
individual pages (i.e maintaining individual pages).
Wiki contributors often want to make pages to explain how to install and
use $foo. The problem is that installing $foo is explained in apt
documentation, then one should read /usr/share/doc/$foo/README.*, then
$foo's manpages and documentation.
> * Limit spam
>
> Not putting content to avoid spam is a strange way to fight spam.
I consider that people who create a wikihomepage to link to their
homepage are actually spamming.
> * Limit workload of maintaining the pages
>
> Homepages are maintained by their owner, not you.
I wish it was 100% the case, but we probably handle 20 to 50% of the
maintenance of those pages (fixing links).
> * what if DebianWiki had 1 million user wiki home page ?
>
> That would be great because we would have 1 million contributors!!!
... and the [current] wiki search engine would be useless.
But actually, I think it would be a great challenge/game to reach that
figure (ok, you started to play already! ).
> * the wikihomepage and regular wikipage share the same namespace
>
> Fortunately family names rarely collide with names that are interesting
> for us.
True, but not every one use their last name, and you can't imagine how
people are creative.
> > I didn't mention that the consequence of having a shared namespace, is
> > that when you search in the wiki, results in homepages are listed too...
>
> I'm not sure that's bad but you may want to request a new feature upstream
> to exclude some categories of pages by default… if you think that's this
> behaviour is hurting the wiki.
>
> > Yes, this is a problem in the wiki engine we are using.
>
> Indeed. But MoinMoin is free software so we can enhance it. :)
guess who is co-maintaining moinmoin package ;)
> > > You can't expect everybody to have their own website.
> >
> > There are lots of ISP/associations/companies that offer
> > website/homepage/blog hosting for free. I suppose we can expect
> > contributors to be able to get one.
>
> Well, I don't agree with this. I'm not interested in having them lose time
> to setup a website just to start contributing to Debian.
bof
> So I created a page for this game in my namespace and updated the rules so
> that they should register there:
> http://wiki.debian.org/RaphaelHertzog/NewContributorGame
I was skeptical when I first that page name, but i actually find it
pretty good.
> I hope this is ok for you. I removed the homepages that were created for
> this game.
Thank you.
> BTW, one of the contributors that joined started an esperanto translation
> for the wiki… :)
That's great.
> On a more positive note, maybe you could point me to some documentation
> for beginners that want to help with the wiki ?
People should find quite some resource on how to contribute to the wiki
on: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWiki
Helping with the wiki's maintenance and administration is another story.
> I'm blogging in French to
> show how one can contribute to the various Debian teams
> and I have nothing yet for the wiki team. :)
No Teams/DebianWiki on wiki.d.o, that's so ironic ! (Especially since I
mentioned that I love the Teams/* pages). I'll fix that, based on:
* http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWiki/Contact#admins
* http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWiki/Administration
Regards,
Franklin
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