Wiki suggestions

Leam Hall leam at reuel.net
Sat Feb 7 11:24:01 UTC 2009


Christopher Beland wrote:

> Anyone who agrees to the contributor license can sign up for an account
> automatically and start editing the wiki.  I did that, and I didn't see
> any admonitions to discuss all changes before making them.  If new
> people aren't supposed to jump right into editing, maybe they should
> only have permission to edit the Discussion pages.

I'm happily reading O'Reilly's "Information Architecture for the world 
wide web", and happy someone else sees a few of the same issues that bug 
me. The wiki is great for draft content but unless it is kept to some 
structure it devolves to something even old time users have to use the 
search feature on.

For example, i've posted a page and noted that it is very much in draft. 
Fee free to edit it as you see fit! When it looks good we'll work 
towards integrating it into a more fixed location and document.

My opinion, for what it's worth, is moving towards a CMS. The wiki is 
great for collaborative thinking but there does need to be a more guided 
  hand on the presentation to the users. We are currently having to deal 
with one wiki-mess and I'd prefer to learn our lesson now that just 
repeat the problem behavior.

Think of it as a process flow. On IRC and the e-mail list pretty much 
anyone can suggest anything. Some brave soul takes those notes and 
suggestions and writes the draft wiki page. Others comment, critique, 
and correct. Near the end of term Marketing, Docs, and Graphics teams 
are engaged to help the soon to be birthed page fit into the existing 
schema and docs process. Finally the page is moved to a CMS where some 
few QA folks have edit rights if errors or issues are found.

 From the outside, a potential volunteer looks at Fedora QA and sees a 
coherent, easy to learn from, and easy to use web presence that let's 
them quickly come up to speed on putting their skills and interests to work.

In the past week I have connected with 2 different coders who were 
looking to donate some time and expertise. Awesome! Do we really have a 
web site that makes their transition as fast and painless as possible so 
they can come on in and get to work?

So here's a confession; I make the same mistakes on the pages I create. 
A few people have come back with questions or pointing out unclear 
wording. Thanks! If one person doing a single short page needs help; how 
much more do we as a team need the same for the entire QA web presence?

I strongly urge us to keep the openness of the wiki for collaboration 
but move to some organized stability on the external web presence.

Leam




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