Suggestions for Wiki

Owner: DuckySherwood

This area is for making suggestions about the wiki structure, including

• Mentions of pages that you had a hard time finding; please detail what you tried so that we can figure out how to make it better.
• Requests for documents that you can't find at all. (They might not exist, and OSAF might not be ready to write the document, but if seventy-six people all ask for a certain page, that would move it way up on OSAF's priority list.)
• Suggestions for code changes that would make navigating the wiki easier.

Example #1:

I for green frogs on the green-things page, but they are only linked to from the slimy-things page. They should be linked to from the green-things page, too!

Example #2:

I couldn't find any information at all on the data model design for Tasks. Is there one yet?

Example #3:

I'd like a button that lets me set the background color to green. I'd like everything in the "green" section to have a green background.

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(Put your suggestions below here...)

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I think these comments can be good outlines for idea generating and conversation starting, so I would like the policy to become Put your suggestions here at the middle, just below the structured part of the page, instead of the bottom, the way a blog does as it scrolls the old downward into past time...

Another way for the twiki robot man up in the corner to handle this could be to autogenerate a list of links to the suggestions and request the writers to create the meaningful headings as part of their suggestion.

A wiki is sooo flexible it probably tempts many to just skip it, so having a brief guide part of a page, in any layout -- not only at the top, that is not for editing seems useful. These suggestions are probably getting beyond the capabilites of Twiki....I'll stop.

-- JohnGriessen - 21 Aug 2003

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I wonder if the word "Owner" will make it harder to get other people to edit those pages? How about finding a better one? "Pagekeeper"? "Caretaker"? "Wikisitter"? "Janitor"? "Custodian"? No, I think I'll leave this to those raised with English as first language...

-- NilsR - 13 Jul 2003

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(I removed a few suggestions that have been implemented.)

-- DuckySherwood - 11 Dec 2003

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Hi Ducky,

I'm glad I found this page. One thing that I did when working on the HurdWiki^?:Hurd was to follow the TWiki standard template for having a page in each TWiki web for meta-discussion. This page itself is ideal for discussion about the entire wiki (and osafoundation.org web) site as a whole.

What I propose is to create Main.WebDiscuss^? TWiki.WebDiscuss^? Projects.WebDiscuss^? Journal.WebDiscuss^? Jungle.WebDiscuss^? Documentation.WebDiscuss^?. If you create them with these links, the parent will be this page, which makes some sense. Why go to this level of detail? Because the structure of each web can be unique and have different relevant elements. It also allows discussion to flow naturally on the topic of a particular structural wiki element that may move very quickly without losing the comments on webs that move more slowly.

This is a "wiki best practice" I learned through experience collaborating while creating a wiki hosted in Europe. I live in CA. It works well in practice when there is little face to face meeting. There was none at all in my case. I found that this is easy to implement and a consistent way to gather feedback in a well defined place for each web. When I was working with Joachim on the HurdWiki^?:Hurd we found that we used the pages quite often to talk about structural changes for each web. Refactoring with fewer participants expected and real directed discussion is much easier than for other pages on the wiki. We usually reached a consensus for each point and either implemented it or removed the idea from the table completely in most cases. Some ideas are still hanging around which is good to try to gather feedback from other users. For us, this was a direct form of eating our own dogfood.

What do you think about creating this pages for the OSAF wiki?

-- GrantBowman - 03 Apr 2004

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Grant --

I'm not sure that we need separate pages for each WikiWeb, since they are all facets of the same project. I can see absolutely how that would be important if we hosted (stupid examples here) the Evolution WikiWeb, the WebDAV WikiWeb, the Bonsai WikiWeb, etc. -- each of those projects would do their own thing as independent units. However, it's not clear that it makes sense to discuss how Journal should be structured without also talking about how Chandler should be structured.

I must admit that I really like having the discussion be separate from the content, as on the Wikipedia. However, I don't think we're big enough that it would make enough difference to be worth the effort yet.

Anybody else have votes?

-- DuckySherwood - 05 Apr 2004

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