wiki transfer plans

[Paul Sladen]

On Tue, 17 May 2005, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
> we are in the process of moving our main wiki to Moin.

Yeah!  Oops, uncontrolled joy there.  I look forward to a future of
page-loads that take less than 5minutes each :-)

> Are there any pages in the wiki that are frequently linked to from
> external locations that we should refrain from moving,

These Google searchs give us a quick glance as to what is the most popular:

  http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki+"www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki"
  http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki+ubuntu

and these appear to be:

  BinaryDriverHowto RestrictedFormats RootSudo Kubuntu

This is also a pretty good indication of the biggest problems users have.

> or place forwarding pages? Thanks.

I would dearly hope that HTTP redirects can be put in for *all* pages that
are renamed or moved.  I do this for all pages I move with '.htaccess':

  Redirect permanent /diary.html http://www.paul.sladen.org/diary/

Even if (as above) I made the change several years ago!  This is much less
annoying than following a link to find it going nowhere.  It helps the
search-engines find the new page and ''carry-over'' the link-weight from the
previous location.

> we plan to set up regions (defined by sub-page structures)

Whilst I'm used to the CamelCase for wiki pages themselves, I'm not a fan of
capitalized names for directories;  the ones mentioned being:

  /Doc /Team /Wiki /Events /People ...

I find these are harder to type (how do you know which case the next letter
needs to be to get the Auto-complete to work?) and are hard to dictate
verbally (''No, no, sorry, backspace, Capital T, e, a, m, slash...'').

I would be a fan of keeping the core subdirectories 'lowercase' since they
are all single-words anyway.

Languages:
==========

If sub-name-spaces for:

  /fr /de /it /ru ...

are introduced;  would this be a good time to move the gross of the existing
english-language content under:

  /en

at the same time?  The harder question is what to do when content is
available in only one language;  I personally prefer to be shown a link to
that content and depending on how desparate I am, I'll try to read/decipher/
translate it myself.

> It was felt that it would be better to group all the pages of a certain
> language together,

This is a hard area.  Currently Debian provides:

  This page is also available in the following languages:
  dansk Deutsch español Esperanto français ...

and uses Apache's built-in language support for serving pages named
'foo.cc.html' where 'cc' is the two-letter language/country code.

I suspect keeping the language content together (as you suggest) is probably
the better option.  Wikipedia do this with:

  http://en.ubuntu.com ...
  http://de.ubuntu.com ...

Of the options;  I think I prefer the domain-names the most.  Downsides
might be the providing a consisent editing environment (cookies being
passed through and having PeopleNames link back to a common place).

> '/People/FirstLast'.

I quite liked the parenting support of zwiki;  perhaps combining this so
that the URL is generated from the combination of the heriarchy and PageName
would allow short names and fully qualified names of URLs.

> The use of the dedicated Moin wiki for the UDU conference seems to have
> been hugely successful

What made the wiki really useful was being able to automate alot of
'reports' (who's working on what) through Moin's powerful searching.

> We can either keep the UDU wiki as the official development wiki for the
> Breezy release or merge it in with the main wiki.

Although it may produce a 10% manual duplication (copying and pasting of old
spec pages to a new development wiki);  this would filter what *really*
needs copying across.  I think one new wiki per release might make sense;  
acting as a good ''clean-out'' every 6 months without distroying the
historical information, since pages would remain at a consisent URL and
continue to be accessible forever.

> Talk pages: ATM, discussion about pages often takes place on the page
> itself. With Moin, this can be placed off on a separate .../Talk

In the long run, I suspect it will be possible to attract many people who
have worked on, or were introduced to wiki's through Wikipedia.  Staying
compatible may be a good thing(tm), for example the scheme:

  ..../FrontPage:Talk

As a UI-issue, this only requires the user appending the URL displayed in
their browser and so easier for the user.  Link for those interest:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Talk_page

> A mock-up of a proposed layout can be seen here:
> http://www.theopencd.net/ubuntu/WikiStyle2.png

Can 'Edit' be moved to the top.  This is the most common action (well,
second most common after that darned Login keeps timing out every 5
minutes!) and every time I expect the 'Edit' link to be in the
top-right-hand-corner rather than bottom-left;

RecentChanges could probably be moved to the bottom.  The suggested theme
looks pretty close to the existing zwiki theme and I hope this would help to
not 'jolt' or surprise users (who, on the whole don't like change).

> Another option we should give serious consideration is performing the
> bulk of the transfer by hand. (what, manually? are you crazy?)

The only downside I can see from this is that InternalLinks and redirect
information may not get correctly transferred by hand, but it would give the
doc-team a chance to refresh in their minds what content is in the wiki;  
that in-turn will continue to keep the quality high.

Hope that's useful!

	-Paul
-- 
It sometimes snows here.  London, GB