Fedora websites mailing list and Wiki ownership

Patrick Barnes nman64 at n-man.com
Mon Oct 31 00:12:50 UTC 2005


Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi
>
> We have been managing feedback on the official Fedora websites,
> currently http://fedora.redhat.com and http://fedoraproject.org/wiki
> through bugzilla and discussions in the marketing list. It makes sense
> to have a independent mailing list -> fedora-websites-list which can
> also be used for discussing wiki pages. The wiki has good amount of
> community buy-in and the amount of content being added is growing
> rapidly. While this is indeed a positive development we need to make
> sure the content is organized and kept updated.
Also worth noting is that creating fedora-websites-list vs.
fedora-wiki-list allows this to cover not just the wiki, but f.r.c and
other websites that may now or in the future be under the umbrella of
the Fedora Project.  We can also allow others who run third-party sites,
such as Thomas Chung and Bob Jensen, to weigh in on the official sites
and follow along with the direction the project is taking.  This
perfectly compliments the new Bugzilla component created for the same
purpose.
>
> Patrick Barnes has been keeping a good eye on this in general and I
> guess we can declare him the wiki master which is essentially the role
> he is performing .Going ahead, it might be a good idea to introduce a
> concept of "ownership" to each of the wiki pages.  Every page would
> have a comment on top which declares the owner. Everyone in the edit
> group should have their own wiki pages filled out with atleast the
> contact information . Every page is also subscribed atleast by the
> owner of that page to monitor changes and keep the content relevant
> and updated.
It may take time to establish 'best practices' for new EditGroup
members, but having a head to roll if problems occur is the entire
reason we have the EditGroup in the first place.  We should encourage
all EditGroup members to provide at least one method of contact on their
wiki homepage.
>
> This process would help us make sure that unmaintained pages are
> marked as such and provide hints to users on what could be potentially
> outdated. It would also provide a list of pages that new wiki users
> can take care of and it provides accountability for the wiki itself.
Encouraging EditGroup members to take up unmaintained pages will also
help us clean up areas of the site that have long been ignored, and will
help us reduce the number of orphaned pages on the wiki.  Accountability
really isn't the top concern here, IMHO.  It is a measure that can
greatly benefit the quality of the wiki.  Translating this same idea to
other Fedora materials that don't already have this kind of measure
would surely also be advantageous.

Applying this particular method to the Docs arena would be doubly
valuable.  I would imagine that this would be easier and more reliable
than simply maintaining a long list of writers and editors.  Since this
will be implemented as comments, it would both be very flexible and
would be easy to filter out or parse where needed when converting or
publishing documents.
>
> Suggestions welcome.
>
> regards
> Rahul
>
For reference, a line declaring the owner of a document can be added to
the beginning of the document to look like this:

##owner FooBar
= Document Title =
And document contents.

As a matter of best practice, these comments should probably come after
parsing instructions or ACL lines.

For Docs, using ##writer and ##editor might also be of interest.

Any thoughts?

-- 
Patrick "The N-Man" Barnes
nman64 at n-man.com

www.n-man.com
-- 



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