A tale of two wikis

[thegreedyturtle]

On Wed, 2005-05-11 at 11:22 +0100, 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 would be an open
> 'Drafting Wiki' (no pun intended) and one a 'Publishing Wiki', possibly
> with separate sections for Breezy, Perky, etc. The Drafting Wiki would
> function much as today's main wiki in that anyone can log on and edit
> pages or start new pages. The Publication Wiki by contrast would be more
> tightly bolted down, with a few editors making decisions on what
> material from the open wiki was ready for inclusion. The editors would
> generally be chosen from the doc team, perhaps through a nod from the
> Community Council.

I think that having two wikis can be a very good way to keep more
control over the content of official releases, but I also feel that
community contributed documents should be given much more value than
just a draft status. It may be found that useful content really has
little place in any kind of official documentation, but would still be
useful to others. My point here is that I think the two wikis should be
very closely integrated. People should be able to go back and forth
between the two very easily, possibly even in a streamlined fashion. If
there is a more current page in the draft section, people should be able
to see that on the Published section, and if a draft has been published
they should be able to quickly view the 'final' version.

I think it would be better to have the published wiki less 'bolted down'
than the yelp and other official manuals, probably by throwing tons of
editors at the published wiki and not quite as many at converting things
to yelp. I think that there will be many things in the wiki that people
shouldn't really be reading in yelp - yelp needs to be very clear, so
that the non-computer savvy user can use it very easily, while the wiki
(and possibly a related 'manual') should have much more advanced
documentation.

An interesting idea with the locking of publications would be to lock
pages at the time of a release. Since software is evolutionary, it would
be useful for people to be able to see the versions of a document as
they applied to Hoary and Warty.

Other than that, I'd like to say that I'd like to see more images in the
wiki. It should be very easy to upload images and find them in a central
location for re-use, especially with Ubuntu's focus on the GUI. Some
quick and easy icons for authors to use would make things look a lot
nicer too.

And I also need it to whiten my teeth as I sleep, since they are getting
a little grubby now.

I'd like a workshop, but I live in the USA. It will definitely be good
to put together a list of things we need to get the party started.

-thegreedyturtle

P.S. We should use a satellite too. Those are really cool.