So we have two different styles of wiki under one space, which is fine. Talking with Toshio today, I found myself reiterating a sort-of unnofficial policy. Wondering if this makes sense, and can we start doing more to make it clear.
There are two audiences for our wiki:
A - Contributors and participants, who use the wiki for process documentation, drafts, policies, etc.
B - End-users, who use the wiki to learn how to do something in Fedora. This category also includes the people who write how-to pages.
We have never formally embraced the second group, and I think we can and should.
There has been a loose, unofficial policy around all this for a while. After Toshio brought up the challenge of when people use Talk: pages for the first category, thereby splitting up the discussion, it seems to make sense to make the policy a little more formal. Here is a first stab:
== Contributor-focused pages (A) ==
* Pages are draft until the page owning sub-project agrees it is not a draft, then the draft header is removed.
- This means the actual page is used for drafting, including inline comments, instead of using the Talk: pages. Inline comments are removed as part of the no-longer-a-draft actions.
* Discussions of page content happen wherever the sub-project has all its other discussions - mailing list, IRC, etc.
- Using Talk: pages here should be deprecated.
* These pages need an owner, best a group, who are responsible for making sure to answer questions about it, update it, etc. There should be a badge on the page that identifies the owner, which links to a sub-section on the owner sub-project main page that explains how they deal with questions about their wiki pages.
== End-user-focused pages (B) ==
* These pages should build on Wikipedia practices as much as possible.
- Refer to those practices in the "how to use our wiki for documenting end-user content", which could be part of [[Help:Editing]].
- Have the [[Help:Editing]] page address this form of content, too.
* Encourage people in #fedora, users@, etc. to write and use these pages.
* Discussions about the page content happen in the [discussion] (Talk:) page. This is from the Wikipedia idea that each page is an individual information node, and all discussion about that node happens in the node.
* These pages are moved from draft to real using categores: * [[Category:Draft documentation]] * [[Category:Documentation]] * [[Category:How to]] * [[Category:Topic documentation]] (e.g. Apache, SELinux, etc.) * Others to be created
* People who want to work on end-user content need only look in the draft category for what needs help.
== what next ==
* Badges for pages that link to the main owner sub-project or another page that says what to do with pure content pages.
* One page write-up that says what to do when you find a page that you want to comment, file a bug, or ask questions about.
* Warn sub-projects they need to own their pages with a badge.
* Template for sub-project pages that explains what they do about their wiki pages.