> ok, I've understood that it has not been a technical reason to give the > wiki a try but community involvement. It's good to keep this in mind.
That is the one thing I really find important as well. The more community involvement we have, the better. :-) > But with the User Guides - did you experience a higher contribution > activity up to now? As far as I've seen the English Guides have been in > the wiki for quite a year now? I haven't been monitoring them as closely as the Dev, Admin and Basic guides. Jean is in a better spot to comment on them. > Sorry, I've never been using it so I did not know the skill level > needed. It's not impossible :-) and someone familiar with raw HTML, or XML will find DocBook to be understandable. Basically DocBok IS XML. > But in docbook the filters already exist for several output formats. And > they are maintained by others. With ODT, hasn't all this to be > generated again? (just a question) Yes DocBook is very versatile. You can transform it into many different end formats. One of the outputs we have in the Wiki Collections is DocBook by the way. > Another present concern is that the wiki in it's actual structure is not > very attractive to end users. It is not very usable. Main issues are > IMHO: it serves for several purposes spread too wide apart (development > and community and end user documentation), search cannot be restricted > to one language (or e.g. one version or one purpose), and some of the > pages are of questionable quality or even "trial pages". Good end user > documentation has to be very clearcut and clean, it is measured by its > usability. And only a good, promising set-up attracts people. So the > goal "community involvement" seems to be foiled to a certain extent by > the suboptimal realization. I agree completely.. the structure is poor. Some of that is due to choices and decisions made when the Wiki was originally set up - one that haunts us for the multi language thing is the lack of namespaces. The original wiki was setup as a single namespace for reasons that made sense at the time. Now that the Wiki has grown and the number of languages in use has exploded, we are seeing the side effects of that choice... something that was not foreseen or considered years ago. Switching now to Namespaces is close to impossible without starting a totally new Wiki and moving pages over. That's a huge job... IF the language specific pages are set up with the ISO name in the URL and are _consistant_ then you can set up a custom Google search for those language specific subpages. For example if the DE group has all the German pages under /wiki/DE/pagename then the Google search can be set to index and return results just for the DE subpages. I can set this up (requires a custom Wiki extension for each language) One thing that would help... is a shuffle of some of the pages - for example, the Devguide could use some re-work to put some of the pages into a more readable state. Another thing we could consider is FlaggedRevs - this flaggs pages as reviewed/not-reviewed. Pages that are validated and correct are marked as such.. pages not reviewed are also clearly marked. There are a few issues with implementing this extension - but it's worth considering. Wikipedia is starting to use it, and the MediaWiki Wiki uses it. C. -- Clayton Cornell ccorn...@openoffice.org OpenOffice.org Documentation Project co-lead StarOffice - Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Hamburg, Germany --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@documentation.openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@documentation.openoffice.org
