https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Software/ProjectHome

[Matthew East]

Hi,

On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Allan Day <allanpday at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all!
>>
>> WikiGuide page and its subpages are a
>> statement of the guidelines that anyone editing the wiki should follow
>> and apply. For that reason we need to ensure that they are consistent
>> and it's not helpful to have "RFC" or "still in discussion" ideas
>> there about how people should be editing the wiki.
>
> Though the current WikiGuide has some good aspects, if feel that it could be
> improved. In particular, the following could be beneficial:
>
> * Prioritise the essential information. At the moment, it's a flat
> structure. All subpages are equivalent, even though they are not all as
> relevant to the first time contributor.

That sounds reasonable. What sort of prioritisation did you have in mind?

> * Include a bit of guidance about what work needs to be done - wouldn't have
> to be much - an encouraging word, a link to WikiToDo.

Yes, that's a good idea.

> * Add or link to recommendations about page structure and content. I've been
> editing the wiki for a while now, and I still feel quite uncertain about
> some of these points. What sections should a page have? How should headings
> be organised?

Yes, I agree that is a good idea. We can start by reference to this
page - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DocumentationTemplate which
can provide a basic template for a new page, and which can be referred
to in the WikiGuide.

I'm going to add one more point for discussion. I noticed that part of
the Software/ProjectHome initiative seems to be to add a brief list of
contributors to the bottom of each page. This has been discussed in
the past, and we've always rejected it - it's not practical to include
a proper attribution list on the bottom of every page because the
contributors to most pages are extremely wide-ranging and such lists
would be wrong. An incomplete attribution list is not a good idea
because it fails to give credit to some contributors. A proper
attribution list is available from the page revision history
(available from the "Info" link), and we shouldn't try to duplicate
that by manually maintaining lists of contributors in the body of
pages.

> I think it's good that Duncan has been trying to promote an engagement with
> these issues. At the same time, I agree with Mark that the WikiGuide should
> be a relatively static resource - it needs to be in order to serve its
> function. I also agree that it is good to discuss changes to 'policy' before
> taking action (not quite the right word, I know).

That's all I've asked...

> I would really like to have a discussion about how the WikiGuide could be
> developed, and I have some tentative changes that I would like to
> contribute, but what is the best way to discuss these changes? I guess we
> could use https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WikiGuide/PageDiscussion, but
> I'm not sure how many people follow that page.

This is exactly the right way! Thanks for emailing your comments.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF