how can I help?

[Karsten Wade]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 12:02:16PM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:

> I hate to be a stop-energy-spreader, but I'm not a big fan of the 'ten
> thousand tiny pages' school of documentation. It winds up with two major
> drawbacks: you can't ever find anything, and nothing gets updated.
> (Visit the Gentoo wiki to observe both in operation).

Short answer -- transclusion works, what's the problem?

Both problems are a human process issue -- we need to create landing
pages (categories?) that help people find things; we need to mark
pages as needing regular updating so they don't get forgotten.

> Most issues that are encountered on #fedora or forums, for instance,
> should be documented in either the Common Issues page, or the Release
> Notes. This was mostly what my earlier (long) email to the list was
> about, which no-one seemed to reply to. I really think it's better to
> keep things in some semblance of organization in central, canonical
> pages, rather than having zillions of single-issue pages...

Functionally, it's the same thing.  Atomic wiki articles can be
gathered in to a single common issues or release notes.  One big
document is daunting to some people, so it's nice to be able to
regather those same articles under a different title.  This is where
categories work for us.

If an article, such as [[Enabling sudo in Fedora]], were in these
categories:

[[Category:F10]]
[[Category:F11]]
[[Category:Release notes]]
[[Category:How to]]
[[Category:Installing software]]
[[Category:Essential sysadmin skills]]
etc.

Then each of those category pages becomes a single document, easy to
find, that has variable length depending on the subject matter.

The thing is, one REALLY BIG MULTIPLE KB page in MediaWiki has
problems.  I'm willing to trust upstream on this -- if they warn about
32kb+ pages, there is a reason.

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Community Gardener
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
AD0E0C41
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