Wiki
 

I have a question...
Why is the Wiki so empty. If there is a thread for a certain topic, it usually links to a Thread here in Talk. Not that i dont like the FOrum, but having to read 425712 pages with 30% smaltalk, 40% outdated stuff and 20% replies or questions about outdated stuff (in a foreign language, but thats my problem) is not what you want to do when you want to install an aplication. (at least it is not what *I* want to do.)
i found wonderful howtos here in the Forum. But usually the one one the first page is outdated.
Why not in the Wiki and keeping it up to date.
Now, one may say "go and do something about it"
Yes, i will. As soon as i think "hey, this should be in the Wiki", ill create an article. But my english isnt that good and i dont like writing articles about something that i only managed to do by "magic" or didnt manage to do. (like mounting a Samba share... with cifs... if you look it up in the wiki youll see exactly what i mean...)

Re: Wiki
 

It's up to all of us; I've recently updated a page on cunning tricks using the browser's location bar but that's about it of late. It's probably worth, whenever you see an explanation that seems clear to you copying it to the wiki then posting a reply saying you've done so and inviting people to improve any weaknesses of language.

Re: Wiki
 

the problem is that nobody is interested about wiki and nobody knows it exists.
but my experiences from trick tomj mentioned are only positive.

Re: Wiki
 

Hi,

I don't think the wiki is empty. It's certainly hard to organise, and a lot of time gets spent trying to make information searchable & browsable. And the wiki's search engine sucks, for a variety of reasons.

What we are missing is a mass of volunteers who are extracting content from the forums, searching for similar content on the wiki and either creating new articles, adding questions to the FAQ or modifying & improving existing pages.

The editing work to try to have a reasonably consistent style for page names, content style and ensuring that pages aren't orphans that don't get linked to elsewhere in the site is a lot of work, and we're always looking for people who would like to take on a small part of the load. There are a number of drive-by editors, but the Maemowoki Action Group has not really been very active recently - I should try to change that.

Would you like to help out?

Other problems the wiki has, which we have not reall solved - how do we handle Nokia 770/N800/N810 content? We haven't been dumping it, but it's not very well maintained either, and many people are finding older content with documentation that doesn't apply to their device, which is a problem.

This is also the problem we've had in the wiki when people copy content wholesale from the forum - the content often refers to older hardware and doesn't get updated. Many people don't try to copy or edit the material at all, they just link to a Talk thread (and then someone else has to do the copying/editing work, or just leave the Talk link there - guess which happens most often). The style & quality varies wildly.

Do you have any suggestions on how we might improve the situation?

One of the issues is that the wiki is seen as "a community resource", not a Nokia managed resource, so few Nokia documentation people contribute to its maintenance. There are a number of official documents now in the wiki, and those get maintained by Nokia, but outside of the wiki.

You're referring to http://wiki.maemo.org/Accessing_Windows_CIFS?

What's wrong with it?

Cheers,
Dave.

Re: Wiki
 

Patently untrue!!! Please don't make generalizations like that (or all for that matter). I always search the wiki before these forums because it is organized in a much more helpful way.

I agree with the OP's original point that the wikii doesn't have enough information...for instance, where is a page with every DBUS command? There is one titled 'phone control' which has some but clearly not all (e.g. the one buried here in some thread that shows how to sync mail for exchange). The DBUS commands are very helpful building cron events which I run in alarmed.

I suppose this is what I can add to the community (haven't programmed since 1988 and have no eye for graphics but I am probably a good example of the kind of user that could be helpful to Newbies that 'get it') so I should start doing it. The problem is inertia, where do I start?

Hmm, I will take theweekend to thing about that.

Fred

Re: Wiki
 

Like API docs, I don't think a wiki is appropriate for this - what would be great is a tool which would allow application developers to document DBus APIs the way they document their C APIs, in the source code.

You can also have the DBus calls documented through the "register" calls they make to listen on the bus, and be able to query the bus for the complete possible API, the way GIMP plug-ins work - this is what DFeet does. We could then parse all the register calls in the source code & generate HTML pages directly from the sources.

I looked into this some time ago, but there doesn't appear to be an easy way to do this (yet).

Perhaps David Greaves could share how he generated the Phone Control docs? I believe he did them by hand, with DFeet.

Dave.

Re: Wiki
 

The problem is that for users that just want to use DBUS calls from the command line or a simple script that can be run from Alarmed these types of documentation are too obtuse to be much value. Therefore, there would need to be a wiki entry to tell people how to generate the html pages, etc . Good idea though, it would be better than what exists now.

Re: Wiki
 

Only one sentence about the situation regarding the N900 (But a link to a looooong thread which shows the process from a first idea and release to the stuff you can see in the repository now). No word about the nice GUI 'wizard mounter'.

I'm not a native speaker and with not much time investing in wiki oarticles... I'm on page one of the wiki contributers. There should be so much possible if only 1 % of the energiy from t.m.o would be transferred to the wiki.

It would be great for example to have a wysiwyg editor in the wiki. It should be as easy as possible to contribute to the wiki.

But thw main point is the bad search and site integration! Please go to maemo.org and search for "cifs". Nothing!

The wiki also should be a main category on the page like "talk" and "news".

Just my 2 cents,
ciap jukey

Re: Wiki
 

My life is slowly coming back to me (Wayahay!) and I should be more available by mid week. I have several pending knitting projects that will require my time (n900 phonesocks in tmo colours, anyone?) but if people (and especially Dave) can point me to threads that need wikifying, I'm happy to help. I owe the community. ;)

Re: Wiki
 

Yeah, thats EXACTLY why i thougt the CIFS Wiki Entry is a good (negative) example (if you are using a N900). From the Forum Thread i know that it is possible to mount CIFS. But i only had an hour or two of spare time, and that was hardly enough to read the Forum Thread.

The Wiki Page is also a good place for more complex command line operations. Why not? I come from debian, and debian has manpages. Maemo has no man pages, why not using the Wiki. Why not putting things in that "the average user doesnt need to know"? Yeah, some Scriptkiddies may brick their devices (not everyone bricking his device is a script kiddie, dont get me wrong here) but that cant be the reason for not using the wiki to explain complex console operations.