Re: Wiki

[Frank Lin PIAT <fpiat@klabs.be>]

Ean, William,

The statistics on my own page related to Debian show that most people
reach a given pages by googling. Also, people tend to omit the keywords
"Stable", "Testing" or "Unstable" from their search. So, if we have two
pages dealing with a topic, one for Stable and one for Testing, visitors
will reach the most popular one (ie. higher page rank...).

As a consequence, we usually advocate "all in one page", where each
distribution is discussed in a separate paragraph, so the visitor reach
the page, then choose the appropriate paragraph in the page's table of
content. The /WiFi pages is a very good example, like:
 http://wiki.debian.org/iwlagn

Alternatively, for some rare page, the instruction are so different, and
the page is already so long, that it is better to split them, for
clarity, like for : http://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn pages


On Fri, 2010-05-14 at 09:01 -0500, Ean Schuessler wrote:
> I have a sort of related idea for the wiki that might be useful for 
> Debian. We could write an extension that allows a page author to express 
> dependencies on a particular version range of package being available in 
> one of the distributions. For instance, you could add something like 
> [[[depends: libc6(< X.X):stable]]] to a page that discusses some an 
> aspect of installing a libc6 in stable that is known to change at 
> version X.X. A report could be generated on a nightly basis with pages 
> that have "broken dependencies" as well as automatically inserting a 
> "Information on this page may be out of date" warning on the page.

As the wiki grows and gets more contributors, we may have enough editors
for such configuration: identifying the "affected" version is difficult
and time consuming.

I agree that it would be great to have "à la docbook" (or "à la WML")
conditional statements and variables in the wiki pages, especially for
distribution name, vendor name, architecture and kernel type.
This would allow share/collaborate wiki pages with other distributions.
Also, we could use some javascript to show/hide appropriate section...
unfortunately I am not aware of any wiki tool that can edit
Docbook/WML :-(


> On 05/12/2010 07:32 AM, Ean Schuessler wrote:
> > It seems like an awful lot of content would be duplicated and, even
> more strangely, over time the "unstable" wiki would become the
> "stable" wiki because the versions of Debian would continue to be
> released and move forward.

Regards,

Franklin