Wiki musings

[Karsten Wade]

On Wed, 2005-08-24 at 08:40 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-08-24 at 14:17 +0200, Peter Boy wrote:
> > Am Mittwoch, den 24.08.2005, 08:01 -0400 schrieb Paul W. Frields:
> > > > Maybe I missunderstand that, but wouldn't it be preferrable to have one
> > > > integrated table with all content, marked as doc/draft/wiki in one
> > > > column to provide an easy overview and orientation for the user? For the
> > > > detail view you can easily organize it in a /doc  /doc/draft/ ...
> > > > structure to fulfill the technical needs of the infrastructure. 
> > > 
> > > The problem I see with that approach is that with Drafts, we probably
> > > want to *discourage* users who are casually browsing the Wiki from
> > > gleaning incorrect guidance.  If they can read a table full of all the
> > > docs at once, many of them will ignore admonitions and read draft docs
> > > with an unwarranted level of confidence.  
> > 
> > That may be a problem, indeed. Perhaps it helps to use different colors
> > for the row background (which may destroy the web design), or to use two
> > or three separate tables?
> 
> Neither of those would address the problem of discouraging the casual
> browsing.  They would merely be another kind of admonition.  IMHO the
> tables should be on different pages, with the table of published docs
> being prominent and the table of drafts... well, somewhere *less*
> so. :-)

However, we miss potential contributors if we deliberately hide the
drafts.  

Instead, think of going to download.fedora/fc<version>/ and seeing these
choices:

core/
updates/
rawhide/

If you choose something called rawhide/, that's what you get.

We can only go so far in protecting people from themselves before we
start to serve less good because of all the protective measures.

The table with different columns for complete and draft might be a good
way to do this.  Or two lists, above and below each other, with the
finished on the top, and the drafts on the bottom.

Also, this page needs to be manually populated, right?  Just creating
Docs/Drafts/Foo doesn't need to put it in the table of choices.  When
something is ready, as per the editor discretion, it is added to the
list of drafts on Docs/.

People wandering the Wiki will find pages in Docs/Drafts/ marked with
lots of "TIGERS BE HERE".  At that point, we have done what we can.  If
they want to jump off the cliff to test their new wings, so be it.

- Karsten

-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE * Sr. Tech Writer * http://people.redhat.com/kwade/
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