On Mon, Aug 02, 2010 at 08:50:41PM +1000, David Timms wrote:
On 02/08/10 09:07, Karsten Wade wrote:
On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 08:40:44PM -0400, Christopher R. Antila wrote:
...
This scheme gives two types of documentation: a fixed release guide that can be printed and referenced; a more flowing set of wiki pages with various quantities and qualities of information.
Is this scheme already used in other fields of Fedora ?
Anyway, makes a lot of sense: developer (writers) just commit fixes/changes to the wiki whenever they can and the (print) manual gets updated with information as needed.
With the exception of back-end tooling that mostly hurts the Big Guide writers, it's a pretty nice balance.
I do find that long wiki pages can be overwhelming to use. You see it load, and the web browser vertical scroll bar pointer ends up tiny. You scroll a few pages down, and realize that you simply don't have the time to read that much, and try finding alternate material.
Agreed, and MediaWiki has guidelines about keeping pages short that we an use. We can also use transclusion, which lets us included multiple individual pages in to one page, where desired. For example, if the topic were Audacity, you create:
* A series of stand-alone topic-specific pages about Audacity (topics can be reused across tools): [[Recording with Audacity]], [[Editing with Audacity]], etc.
* Each topic-specific page can be further broken down to sub-topics to keep the pages light and focused.
* Each page is in one or more categories, so the category pages become a lightweight table-of-contents approach, e.g.:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fonts redirects to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Fonts
If you drill down in to those subcategories, you'll find dozens of pages in the subcategories.
Anyway, I think we can make a set of reasonable nestings of categories and a template page to follow, then highlight the main steps to start and maintain an audio tool wiki page.
For a music spin, is there an easy process to extract the contents of the wiki pages so that they can be added as ?html? to a spin. (eg assume user doesn't have internet where they are using the spin) ?
There is a package 'python-mwlibs' that includes tools for extracting things from a MediaWiki instance. We use it for converting out an XML that is about 80% useable as-is, it could probably make XHTML easily.
- Karsten