wiki transfer plans

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

As most of you know, we are in the process of moving our main wiki to
Moin. The page structure is slightly different from zwiki, so the move
will imply some change in the structure and some changed URLs. At the
same time, this is a good opportunity to do some cleaning up in the
wiki, removing and merging pages. I would like to just hear people's
views on this. Are there any pages in the wiki that are frequently
linked to from external locations that we should refrain from moving, or
place forwarding pages? Thanks.


Wiki structure in Detail
------------------------

The current wiki has about 1500 pages, of which about 270 are end-user
docs, 350 are user pages, 250 are non-English, 75 are dev documentation,
just to name a few types.

To gain a bit more structure in the wiki cloud, we plan to set up
regions (defined by sub-page structures) of the wiki for certain
categories of material. Please see a diagram of the proposed new wiki
structure here:
http://www.theopencd.net/ubuntu/WikiStructure.png

_This layout is only a suggestion_ and can be changed as we go along.
Please comment. The dark brown region is the base layer of the wiki
where it will still be natural to place certain pages that require a
simple URL, such as user pages so that they can be linked to with a
simple 'FirstLast' link instead of the more cumbersome alternative
'/People/FirstLast'. Anyone can add and edit pages on the root level and
can start whole new sub-structures. One exception might the page
'FrontPage' which currently changes a bit too often, considering that it
is a point of arrival for new users.


Local language areas
--------------------

It was felt that it would be better to group all the pages of a certain
language together, much as they are currently grouped, instead of having
PageName and it's translations PageName/fr, PageName/de. This is because
it makes it easier to browse the tree of a given language, and because
many of these pages are written originally in that language and may not
have an English equivalent.


Development area
----------------

The use of the dedicated Moin wiki for the UDU conference seems to have
been hugely successful as it reduced the relative noise and allowed for
better focus on a very specific set of tasks. We can either keep the UDU
wiki as the official development wiki for the Breezy release or merge it
in with the main wiki. The development section of the main wiki should
in any case include useful information about Ubuntu development
generally. (After the release, the UDU wiki might be frozen and a new
one set up of the next conference/release.) I'd like to hear views on
this from those currently using the UDU wiki.


Documentation area
------------------

In the proposed structure, the '/Docs' page would be the new 'homepage'
for the documentation team, where there would be information about the
team, help and guidelines on writing docs, links to work in progress,
etc. The doc team may also choose to develop the end-user documentation
directly in the wiki and use sub-sections to manage the workflow, and
indicated by the Trunk and Breezy boxes. An advantage of using Moin is
that we can process the content in various ways with parser routines
[1]. This should make it easier to convert a section of pages to DocBook
format.


Other features
---------------

Talk pages: ATM, discussion about pages often takes place on the page
itself. With Moin, this can be placed off on a separate .../Talk
sub-page. A page locked (such as the front page)  can still have a Talk
page that is world-writable. A button can be added to the interface to
jump directly to the Talk page (or create it). There is work being done
in the Moin community on local search and RecentChanges listings that
would operate on a group of sub-pages [2]. The time-frame for this is
not known.


Layout
------

We will make a new Moin theme that it integrates the wiki with our main
site. A mock-up of a proposed layout can be seen here:
http://www.theopencd.net/ubuntu/WikiStyle2.png
None of this templating work has been done yet, so Moin template wizards
are welcome to join in :)


Doing the transfer
------------------

We need to investigate the options for doing a semi-automated transfer
of the wiki data. All the wiki pages are now in Moin or Restructured
text format, which should work fine in the new Moin wiki. However, there
are some issues regarding the different handling of sub-pages that must
at least be cleaned up by hand. (some thoughts from UDU: [3])

Another option we should give serious consideration is performing the
bulk of the transfer by hand. (what, manually? are you crazy?) The
advantage with this is that we would have the opportunity to do some
thorough wiki gardening in the process. The 1500 pages could
realistically be transfered by a team of 10-15 volunteers during a few
hours, esp. if we can start from a list in raw text format.

James has set up a test site here: http://test.wiki.ubuntu.com/ where we
will be testing transfer methods. (use that wiki at your own risk, pages
may be removed any time, etc.)

 - Henrik

[1] http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/HelpOnParsers
[2] http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/FeatureRequests/CorporateWiki/SubWikis
[3] http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/WikiTransitionPlan