A tale of two wikis

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Jane Silber wrote:

>
>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.  
>
We might get quite a bit of mileage out of a simple statement at the top
of the page, saying: 'This is a doc team draft page. Please read more
here.' That would lead to a page explaining the process and giving some
guidelines. I expect that the general wiki user would respect that 'doc'
pages need to follow a certain format and schedule. It is of course
tempting to just say: OK let's use 3 wikis, Publishing, Drafting and
GeneralCommunity, but that already starts to erode some of the dynamic
nature of the current system, where something can start out as a simple
page with a few lines and turn into a chapter (does this happen?). Then
there is the point made by turtle that some information in the wiki
might be in a very raw state, but still very useful to some people.

I'll have to play more with Moin to see how things can be sectioned off,
but from a quick look at the Moin docs (their wiki ...) it looks like we
may at least have a few options. We can certainly designate doc pages as
sub-pages like 'Docs/MyDocPage', which in itself helps to keep things
tidy. It turn out that you can set access restrictions for any page by
an AccessControlLists command (#acl) at the top of the page in some
detail, restricting editing, deleting, etc. to users or groups [1]. At
the moment these are not inherited by the sub-pages in standard Moin
installs, but there are patches available that make this possible [2].

If this works as expected, we should be able to set up an area of the
wiki where only editors could add pages, but anyone could edit. We could
have a system where anyone could start a page in / or /newpages and then
send an email to the doc-submissions@ mailing list to have it moved over
to /doc. An editor would then decide if it's ready to qualify as an
official doc team draft and where it should fit into the structure. Once
the page had been moved over to /doc it could again be edited by anyone,
but no longer moved/renamed/deleted by anyone. (or variations on that theme)

Moin also has the concept of a 'wiki farm', which I guess is a
collection of wikis tied together (but the docs on this are poor so I'm
not sure [3]). Setting up several wikis in a farm would certainly
provide some separation and the separate RecentChanges feature, but
might make it all less dynamic; I'm not sure how well you can move pages
between wikis or search across them.

About gardening: I think some regular gardening is a good thing if we
can integrate it into the natural workflow. This includes knowing who
should be gardening when and with what goal, etc.. Is it up to
editors/maintainers, or are you supposed to garden your own pages, and
how would that work? I think it is important to aim for a system where
gardening seems useful and lasting, so that when you put in some
gardening time you know that you are moving the project forward and that
it won't all be undone by the following week of contributions. One way
is to have a general cloud of wiki pages in the open wiki which can be
herded into the slightly restrictive doc-drafting area and later into
the very restrictive Publishing area/wiki. That would be two clearly
meaningful gardening steps.

- Henrik

[1] http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/HelpOnAccessControlLists
[2] http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/HierachicalAccessControlList
[3] http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/FarmQuestions