web-discuss list and Mandriva wiki organisation

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A public discussion list has been open to discuss all Mandriva web related project.

 

The list is open to anyone who is willing to participate.

 

The first discussion taking place right now is the new Mandriva Community wiki, here is its annoucement.

 

Hi to everyone,

 

and welcome on this list. We did set it up a few weeks ago to handle all

public discussion related to Mandriva web places.

 

Matters of discussion may be technical, content-related, strategy-related,

ideas/wishes related. Of course, the community wiki should host a mirrored

place of this list.

 

(this post may be... long, take your time reading it, and if replying, please

remove any portion of text that is not related to what your are answering to.

Thanks. Smile

 

Now, straight to the point, the community wiki.

 

 

THE CONTEXT

 

As you may (or not) know it, we set up a new platform, based on mediawiki, to

host all Mandriva public wiki stuff (old twiki platform became difficult to

maintain, several distinct platform were getting used). This includes the old

QA/Cooker wiki (still hosted on http://qa.mandriva.com/wiki/ , read-only),

which used to be mostly mandriva-linux-the-distribution-related.

 

However, it may include anything worth it, public/community matter related to

Mandriva projects and products. In particular, Club existing knowledge base

content may find its way in this new wiki.

 

It is not meant to replace existing published things elsewhere in the Mandriva

websites, still, it may help to point some contents if needed (I, we know

that we need to seriously rearrange the way our contents are laid out, and

how we give access to these on the web; we are working on it, takes time, but

a new global navigation map should be available within a few weeks; still,

this is not our current topic).

 

The final status (fully ready for wild usage) will be announced here by me or

Nicolas. For now, the platform is usable, in English preferably only.

 

 

LANGUAGES

 

Once set up, the community wiki will be multi-lingual; English is the pivot

language (that is, content should preferably be first written in English if

possible, then translated in other languages; that does not prevent from

making language-specific contents, still, making sure all languages are

somehow in sync would be better).

 

We plan, at this stage, to host the following languages (that is, the zone

will be immediately available): Deutsch, English, español, français, polski,

português, Japanese, Chinese.

 

Other zones will be available on request. Note that each language zone will

need to have a dedicated _content manager_ (more about that below).

 

We had a discussion about languages, in particular, do we make full locale

zones, or just language zones (that is, for instance, pt_PT/pt and pt_BR, or

just pt).

 

It's not fully decided yet, but the direction that seems to get most consensus

at this stage here for now (you may disagree; please raise your hand then) is

to have only language zones, unless very strong language specificities.

 

For that preliminar conclusion, we compared the pt (Portuguese as spoke in

Portugal) and pt_BR (Portuguese as spoke in Brazil) case with the potential

fr/fr_FR/fr_CH/fr_CA/fr_BE case, which, in our view, bears about the same

amount of language specificities (there are contexts in which a français,

leaving in France may not understand what a Suisse français or a Québécois

says).

 

Still, we consider that a fr zone is enough. So we believe it _may_ be the

same for other languages. However, we may come to another conclusion after

discussion, that's still open. Céline said to me that nn_NO/nb_NO (Norsk

Bokmål and Nynorsk) may be a case, for instance.

 

 

CONTENTS, LOCALIZATION, LAYOUT, POLICY

 

That is a big chunk.

 

We have all the contents of http://qa.mandriva.com/wiki/ that must be moved

here. That's the cooker/qa thing wiki. Only the English content has been

automatically moved (for several reasons). All localized contents may need to

be manually moved then (you may strongly disagree; again, raise your hand;

however, given that you may have to rename your pages anyway, and restructure

a bit the contents, it may be a better solution to make the process by hand;

my own opinion here).

 

We used to have a specific naming scheme in the old wiki, like:

 

* /wiki/TopicName for the English version of a page,

* /wiki/TopicNameFr for the French version of it.

 

Now, it would map to:

 

* /en/Topic Name

* /fr/Nom du sujet

 

Note that you will have a way, in MediaWiki, to make links from a page to its

other languages equivalents; a robot will run daily to make the links the

other way around.

 

Next to Cooker/QA contents, we may have (or not) to integrate others: Club

knowledge base, beginners area, customers specific area, web, translation,

graphics areas, etc.

 

We have to agree on the contents layout and naming policy too. One is already

available from http://wiki.mandriva.com/Policies/Wiki_Style . We started to

discuss whether a flat layout (using no hierarchical layout, no specific

namespace; using instead categories and maybe the semantic extension) would

be simpler, easier to manage; that would require to set clever maps of

contents.

 

However, the contents are already set up with the hierarchical layout. Still,

we can change that. Or keep half of it (the first node being for distinction

between areas, precisely).

 

The "problem" with hierarchical layout is that:

- it makes it more cumbersome to create nodes: I would have to type

"Web/Mandriva user account" instead of a "Mandriva user account" topic in the

"Web" category (among others);

- the page title would be "Web/Mandriva user account", without the "Web" part

being clickable to go to the upper level.

 

I am (and some others here are as well) in favor of a flat, category-based

layout.

 

 

NOTICE: the current wiki platform will be upgraded, to better take into

account the various languages we are going to support. In this regard, please

do not localize contents yet. You may still update/add English contents to

it, it will be kept. But you may need to further move your local content

otherwise.

 

 

PEOPLE - PUBLIC

 

This wiki is intended to the whole Mandriva community, both developers,

contributors, translators, users, employees, etc. for all community matters.

 

One must have a Mandriva user account (see https://my.mandriva.com/ ) and

authenticate with it to be able to edit the wiki contents.

 

We need to name official content managers, one per language at least.

Depending on the outcome of this discussion (are specific areas

useful/needed?), we may need area-specific content managers as well (Cooker,

Club, Beginners).

 

 

DESIGN, GRAPHIC LAYOUT

 

Will be another topic. Smile

 

 

THANKS TO

 

I would like to thank the people that made this wiki thing moving and running

to this point:

- Vincent Danen, Warly, Thierry Vignaud and Stéphane Laurière who started to

discuss with us this wiki move thing, and started migrating and laying out

the contents from qa/wiki to a test mediawiki place;

- Kleber Brunelli, Arthur Furlan, William Dauchy, Jean-Louis Colautti who

patched the vanilla mediawiki to fit with our setup;

- Nicolas Chipaux for helping to square things and setting up the whole final

mediawiki platform;

- and all contributors who started to clean/edit contents from the test place

to the current one.

 

Thanks to you all for your help.

 

Let's polish this thing now.

 

romain.

 

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