A tale of two wikis

[Jane Silber]

Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:

>So onto the ideas: I have an idea for using two separate instances of
>the Moin wiki to achieve the workflow we are after. 
>
One general comment: although the doc team is a primary user of the
wiki, remember that the wiki serves other communities/purposes than just
documentation.  There is a development component to it, a general
community aspect (e.g., the calendar, community council and tech
boards), a place for teams to coordinate their activities (LoCo teams,
installer team, etc), etc.

I think a better presentation/organisation of the existing
documentation, and process improvements for documentation like standards
and workflow are a welcome improvements, but please remember that
anything the doc team does to become more disciplined may not translate
to all aspects of the wiki.

I'm not sure how this fits in (if at all), but one of the comments I
received about the UDU wiki (www.udu.wiki.ubuntu.com) was how useful it
was to have a Recent Changes list which just focused on the distro
development aspects (because, of course, that's all there is on that
wiki at the moment).  There is so much activity on the main wiki that
Recent Changes becomes less useful as a tool.

I wonder if there is a way to section things off, to create sections of
a wiki with different behavior - create a dev section of the wiki, a doc
section, etc.  and then create a Recent Changes page for each section
and  create a system for moderators/permissions (which is essentially
what you are suggesting with multiple wikis) for the different
sections.  The Ubuntu wiki uses a completely flat file structure with
all pages at the top level.  But if it helped in creating functional
sections of the wiki we could use the built in hierarchical nature of it
- e.g., wiki.ubuntu.com/doc/..., wiki,ubuntu.com/dev/..., etc.  Of
course the more we relay on a structure like that, the greater the
potential need for regular wiki gardening. And I don't know if it is
possible to functionality section it off like that (and have different
RecentChanges, different permissions applying to whole sections, etc).

Some food for thought (and perhaps experimentation?) though.

Jane