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

[Matthew East]

Hi

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 12:10 PM, Duncan Lithgow <dlithgow at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/8/12 Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com>:
>> 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.
> Allan an I have also discussed this. My reasons are a bit complex and
> I'll go through them some other time. What do you think about the
> bottom of this page: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Applications

I have to say that I disagree with the philosophy generally of
repeating in the page text links which are already present (or should
be present) in the page theme. It's high maintenance to include links
like that in every page, and unnecessary if it can be done via the
theme.

The "Page History" link is already provided by the theme (although
it's labelled "Info" since the upgrade, which I think think we should
revert). Equally, "Edit" is also provided by the theme, and the link
to the page talk page should be (as discussed in the
HelpWikiQualityAssurance specification). Obviously, we can make a lot
of improvements to the theme, in particular by reversing some of the
accidental changes to it when occurred on upgrade, and also be
introducing new improvements. I'm working on getting our bzr branch of
the theme updated so that we can work on these.

>>> 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.
> Well, sure. But first we'd have to define when to just go ahead and
> when to ask first. Seems a bit silly to me, and not really the point
> of having a wiki. Of course if some pages could be locked that would
> force us to have a policy for when a page is not to be edited without
> a discussion first. Is that even possible in MoinMoin?

It's pretty easy to use common sense to determine when a particular
change to wiki editing policies should be discussed first or when it
is trivial enough to just go ahead and do it. Having said that,
certainly locking down pages is possible in MoinMoin (we do it here -
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuHashes and it is occasionally
used to prevent edit wars) but I don't think it's necessary to do so
for WikiGuide at this stage.

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