[Brainstorm 2010] Wiki
 

This thread is part of the Maemo Brainstorm 2010

What processes can be put in place to ensure high quality wiki content? What documentation is needed? How should it be organised?

Propose your ideas and suggestions here, let's talk about it, and summarise the best ideas and conclusions in the Brainstorm 2010/Wiki wiki page

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Wiki
 

It's not wiki-related, but more documentation related:

Let's sort out the various Maemo docs, reference materials and so on across different versions.The best example I can come up with is Sun's Javadoc (the complete API documentation for the Java library), plus all the associated
tutorials.

Example problems (OTTOMH):

• Maemo 3 had Python documentation, but the canonical place for that now is the wiki ([s]http://pymaemo.garage.maemo.org/[s])
• Maemo 4 had lots of PDF documentation so isn't easy to search
• Maemo 5 has docs spread across the wiki (both current and archive), Forum Nokia tutorials and the Info Center.

As a developer, I want a library/bookshelf I can go to and see the behaviour of HildonWindow, it's API in Python and click through to the inherited behaviour from Gtk+.

Currently, I end up flipping between the wiki, pymaemo.garage.maemo.org and online references which don't quite match our Gtk+ version.

The problem "should" get better with Qt, but we're not a Qt-based development community (primarily), we're Gtk+. And Qt specifics for accessing Maemo 5 stuff should be alongside the Qt general docs on maemo.org.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Wiki
 

i dont know if its just me...
but the search function af the wiki is either total crap or doesnt work. Anyway, i cant find articles from wich i KNOW they do exist.
That is, i think, a big issue.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Wiki
 

I have sometimes had some difficulty determining if what I'm reading from the wiki is still valid, and to which platform version (Fremantle, Diablo, something older, universal?) it applies to.

Last modified date sometimes helps, but not always.

Can't remember (or quickly find) any good examples, but I'm guessing most are developer documentation related, so Jaffa's comment above also applies.

My suggestion is to recommend authors not to assume devices and/or OS versions, but document what they're writing for.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Wiki
 

Three letter searches? Words of 3 letter or less are not indexed. Longer than that work fine, I would say. If not, please provide examples.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Wiki
 

The wiki search does not handle 2 letter words (by default it doesn't handle 3 letter words either but we fixed that). Outside of that, I can only suggest using wildcards, they improve results dramatically for me.

For relevant bugs, see https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3363 and https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10092

Dave

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Wiki
 

Like with every other wiki, I have a problem finding what I need.

So in my opinion to improve the quality we need:
1) Style guidelines - a set of rules for creating pages eg. a Q&A page should be different from an API page. But every Q&A page should look the same. (other styles: About (something, eg. history about N900), Tutorial, Summary page, Application description/use etc.
2) Style maintainer(auditor) - someone(/or group) who maintains the styles and assess pages for readibility
3) Category + summary pages - need to organize a bit, to reach usefull pages. Currently I google wiki.maemo.org to find what I need BUT I already know it's there somewhere. For someone to find something they need a learning/leading path.

Essentialy the big questions to answer is:
What is the purpose of the wiki?
From this answer the organizing can begin.

For me I see the wiki collection information:
1) General information (device, site, history ...)
2) Application information (about, summary, options, use ...)
3) API information
4) Tutorials
5) Q&A
6) Articles
...

Just my 3 cents.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Wiki
 

Maybe its classical PEBKAC, but:

i know that there is a page handling cifs. i know that "debian" is at least mentioned several times, same with WLan. So its either me not being able to handle the Search or the search / indexing engine is kind of strange.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Wiki
 

Nope - it's one of the bugs I referred to above: https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10092 - currently maemo.org site search is completely broken. It looks like tre various "site:" directives are being escaped/quoted and used as search terms. I have no idea who can fix this.

If I type CIFS into the wiki search box (at http://wiki.maemo.org)& hit "Go" I get to http://wiki.maemo.org/Cifs directly. And using the site search (http://wiki.maemo.org/Special:Search...searchx=Search) gives a number of useful results. I was looking for a bug "there is only Go, no search button, on wiki.maemo.org", but I couldn't find it.

Dave.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Wiki
 

Then again, the best search I've found for Maemo is Google with site:maemo.org: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amaemo.org+cifs

Dave.