wiki transfer plans

Wed May 18 11:14:38 UTC 2005

On 5/18/05, Paul Sladen <ubuntu at paul.sladen.org> wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
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> 

Can I make a suggestion of the buttons on the wiki? 

There is a good reason Wikipedia, et.al use text. Those icons have
always confused me, as where as the word "edit" does not.

Corey