Fedoraproject wiki

[Suvayu Ali]

Hi,

The other day while trying to look for some information on the wiki, I 
got very disappointed with the way the information was organized. 
Specially the search doesn't seem to return very relevant results unless 
you know *exactly* what you are looking for. Somehow the heavy use of 
subpages in the fedora project wiki struck me as odd and inefficient. 
After some searching and reading I came to some conclusions.

1. The concept of subpages evolved from the need to order articles 
hierarchically.[1] However after the category system was introduced, 
this became redundant as organisation of information is in itself a 
non-linear idea and the use of categories is simply much more efficient 
in that regard.

2. The search function in mediawiki looks through the page names in 
specified namespaces. And through a combination of bugs and features a 
particular search might/might not be effective.[2]

So could it be, that the search function could be made more effective if 
we stop using subpages in the 'Main:' namespace? Maybe we could follow 
some thing like wikipedia does, subpages are allowed only in the 'User:' 
namespace. Moreover since a wiki is after all a free-form source of 
information, wouldn't it be more logical to rely on the category system 
to organise the information rather than force some hierarchy by the use 
of subpages?

Just a thought, what do you think? Is this a worthwhile thought?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Subpages#History_of_subpages
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 05/30/2009 12:02 PM, Suvayu Ali wrote:
> So could it be, that the search function could be made more effective if we stop using subpages in the 'Main:' namespace? Maybe we could follow some thing like wikipedia does, subpages are allowed only in the 'User:' namespace. Moreover since a wiki is after all a free-form source of information, wouldn't it be more logical to rely on the category system to organise the information rather than force some hierarchy by the use of subpages?
>
> Just a thought, what do you think? Is this a worthwhile thought?

Fedora used to use MoinMoin where categories were extremely slow and
sub pages were the only way to do things.  After the switch to
MediaWiki, categories are the way to go but the conversion process is
not over.

Susan Lauber, Ian Weller and others are working on this conversion.
You can see some notes at

http://travelingtrainer.laubersolutions.com/search/label/planet_fedora

and more discussions at

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fedora-wiki

IIRC, we have over 10000 pages in the wiki and it is going to take sometime..

Rahul

[Suvayu Ali]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 05/30/2009 12:02 PM, Suvayu Ali wrote:
> > So could it be, that the search function could be made more effective if we stop using subpages in the 'Main:' namespace? Maybe we could follow some thing like wikipedia does, subpages are allowed only in the 'User:' namespace. Moreover since a wiki is after all a free-form source of information, wouldn't it be more logical to rely on the category system to organise the information rather than force some hierarchy by the use of subpages?
> >
> > Just a thought, what do you think? Is this a worthwhile thought?
>
> Fedora used to use MoinMoin where categories were extremely slow and
> sub pages were the only way to do things.  After the switch to
> MediaWiki, categories are the way to go but the conversion process is
> not over.
>
> Susan Lauber, Ian Weller and others are working on this conversion.
> You can see some notes at
>
> http://travelingtrainer.laubersolutions.com/search/label/planet_fedora
>
> and more discussions at
>
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fedora-wiki
>
> IIRC, we have over 10000 pages in the wiki and it is going to take sometime..

Thank you Rahul for the reply. I am really happy that this is being 
worked upon.

cheers,