WikiWordOfTheDay
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| WikiWordOfTheDay | David Neary | 08 Sep 11:52 |
| WikiWordOfTheDay | Roman Joost | 08 Sep 16:08 |
| WikiWordOfTheDay | Øyvind Kolås | 09 Sep 12:43 |
| WikiWordOfTheDay | Sven Neumann | 09 Sep 13:43 |
| WikiWordOfTheDay | Daniel Egger | 08 Sep 17:02 |
| WikiWordOfTheDay | Roman Joost | 08 Sep 19:31 |
| WikiWordOfTheDay | Roman Joost | 08 Sep 20:40 |
| WikiWordOfTheDay | Raphaël Quinet | 08 Sep 21:00 |
| WikiWordOfTheDay | David Neary | 10 Sep 11:27 |
| WikiWordOfTheDay | Phil Harper | 09 Sep 13:51 |
WikiWordOfTheDay
Hi all,
I had a few ideas about collaborative content creation for the website and the documentation project recently, and thanks to Carol's forethought, we have the means to do this at our fingertips.
Problem: Writing docs takes ages, and there are not enough people to do it all, and docs often need little retouching at the end that has to be communicated to the original author, and takes time to integrate, and so on.
Solution: For a given topic, create a wikipage. Make a start on it (sketch paragraphs/sections, basically set up the bare bones of what is needed). And then propose that lots of people make small contributions to it.
We have a wiki (many people might not know that - it's at http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp), which allows just such collaborative effort to take place. On every page in the wiki, there is a link at the bottom to edit the page. Pages are plain text formatted by the wiki motor afterwards into nice looking html. Formatting is very easy - for example, the equivalent of
Header
in the wiki is
== Header ==
Simple.
The problem becomes how to let people know what docs need work at that particular moment, and how to get people working on it. Suggestions to address this point are welcome.
My idea is to have a WikiWordOfTheDay. A WikiWord is a word made up from joining several words together with capitalisation - the word automatically becomes a link to a newly created (empty) wiki page. The wiki word of the day (which might not change every day, and might die as an idea if no-one adds any content) would be posted as part of the topic in IRC, and mailed (perhaps only once a week) to the mailing lists to encourage contributions.
So there's the idea. To work, it'll need the cooperation of the documentation team, the web team and the user and developer communities. One of the things that we need in the web-pages and the docs now is content - and this is one way of distributing the load. As I said, any other ideas how to address this problem are welcome. Objections, for whatever reason, and suggestions for wikiwords of the day to get things started, are also welcome.
To get things started, here's a first WikiWordOfTheDay:
http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/WikiWordOfTheDay
And a second, as an example of the kind of content I'd like to
see:
http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/GettingStartedWithGimp
Cheers, Dave.
WikiWordOfTheDay
On Mon, Sep 08, 2003 at 11:52:10AM +0200, David Neary wrote:
Hi all,
I had a few ideas about collaborative content creation for the website and the documentation project recently, and thanks to Carol's forethought, we have the means to do this at our fingertips.
[..]
So there's the idea. To work, it'll need the cooperation of the documentation team, the web team and the user and developer communities.
Since i used a wiki to collaborate content i love them. The advantage of a wiki is, that maybe everyone can contribute to the docs in "small" pieces. Unfortunatly, we have some problems for new users and contributors to getting involved for writing docs:
1. Learn how to contribute (what is easier to lern: writing XML docs or learn the wiki syntax)
2. If we have some docs on a wiki page, how is it possible to convert them to XML? Maybe it costs more time to convert the wiki docs, than a new contributor will lern XML ...
3. How can we add existing docs to the WIKI?
4. How about translations? The user must be able to write a translation of a given wiki page, in my opinion.
So, in facing this problems i thought, that it'll be better to do the following:
1. Make the project page of the user manual as a wiki page.
2. Let contributors add docs. I think it isn't a problem of getting contributors, which are writing docs. The problem might be, that most poeple write some pieces and no one checks that. For that problem, i think it isn't necessary to move the hole gimp-help-2 project to the wiki. I think, it'll be better to take some good pieces for the gimp-help-2 from the WIKI and include them into the existing docs.
To summarize that, i think a wiki page will be good to stay connected with the current documentation (its great to post news and some short introductions, discuss new things etc.).
But i dislike a wiki, to fetch docs for the gimp-help-2. I think, its an additional expenditure to the existing project.
Greetings,
WikiWordOfTheDay
Am Mon, 2003-09-08 um 11.52 schrieb David Neary:
Problem: Writing docs takes ages, and there are not enough people to do it all, and docs often need little retouching at the end that has to be communicated to the original author, and takes time to integrate, and so on.
Indeed.
Solution: For a given topic, create a wikipage. Make a start on it (sketch paragraphs/sections, basically set up the bare bones of what is needed). And then propose that lots of people make small contributions to it.
Great idea. I like it. The only thing missing is a halfautomatic DocBook/Wiki gateway to synchronize content between the colaboration Wiki work and the real documentation with additional markup.
WikiWordOfTheDay
On Mon, Sep 08, 2003 at 05:02:53PM +0200, Daniel Egger wrote:
Great idea. I like it. The only thing missing is a halfautomatic DocBook/Wiki gateway to synchronize content between the colaboration Wiki work and the real documentation with additional markup.
Okey - i think we need some naming conventions between english and translated docs. Maybe something like "GimpToolboxEllipsel-de" ?
I like to move the project pages to the wiki ...
Greetings,
WikiWordOfTheDay
I started to convert the project page of the gimp-help-2 to the wiki. Its great :) I didn't recognize, that a wiki is such a great tool.
http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/GimpDocs http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/GimpDocsDeutsch
I found the "language Attribute: ##language:" in the header of the wiki doc. It could be used to create translated content, right?
Greetings,
WikiWordOfTheDay
On Mon, 8 Sep 2003 11:52:10 +0200, David Neary wrote:
Solution: For a given topic, create a wikipage. Make a start on it (sketch paragraphs/sections, basically set up the bare bones of what is needed). And then propose that lots of people make small contributions to it.
We have a wiki (many people might not know that - it's at http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp), which allows just such collaborative effort to take place. [...]
A wiki is nice for drafting some things, but I am not too fond of using it for the help system: it would be OK for discussing some ideas, but not for publishing the final result.
A wiki makes it too easy to add lots of WikiWords that remain empty or unmaintained for a long time. Unless there is a strong community interested in keeping the wiki up-to-date and refactoring old entries, many wikis end up being a collection of very valuable contributions mixed with content-free pages. Unfortunately, most visitors do not know which WikiWords are interesting and which ones are not, so it is not always easy for them to find what they are looking for.
Now, don't get me wrong: I like wikis in general. But I doubt that a GIMP wiki will really take off and keep on running for a long time (picture me skeptical about "if you build it, they will come" - or more specifically "they will keep on coming"). We already have enough problems getting contributors for any part of the GIMP (application, plug-ins, help system, web site) so we should be careful about introducing a new area in which people could invest some time. A GIMP wiki can be very useful for discussing drafts and proposing new content that will eventually be migrated to the help system or to the main web site, but the content would have to be migrated over to its destination instead of staying on the wiki. Otherwise, I am afraid that it would sooner or later lose focus.
That's all IMHO, of course. If I am the only dissenting voice, you can ignore me. ;-) In fact, I hope that I am wrong and that we can have a strong community of contributors.
-Raphaël
WikiWordOfTheDay
* Roman Joost [030909 10:51]:
On Mon, Sep 08, 2003 at 11:52:10AM +0200, David Neary wrote:
Hi all,
I had a few ideas about collaborative content creation for the website and the documentation project recently, and thanks to Carol's forethought, we have the means to do this at our fingertips.
[..]
So there's the idea. To work, it'll need the cooperation of the documentation team, the web team and the user and developer communities.
pieces. Unfortunatly, we have some problems for new users and contributors to getting involved for writing docs:
1. Learn how to contribute (what is easier to lern: writing XML docs or learn the wiki syntax)
2. If we have some docs on a wiki page, how is it possible to convert them to XML? Maybe it costs more time to convert the wiki docs, than a new contributor will lern XML ...
Depending on which wiki is installed,.. changing it to use a more XML-like syntax (xhtml),.. and using more correct identifiers for the documentation items shouldn't be too much work.
Parts of xhtml can be mapped to DocBook, but not all (I'm not that familiar with it)
/Øyvind K.
WikiWordOfTheDay
Hi,
Øyvind Kolås writes:
Depending on which wiki is installed,.. changing it to use a more XML-like syntax (xhtml),.. and using more correct identifiers for the documentation items shouldn't be too much work.
Parts of xhtml can be mapped to DocBook, but not all (I'm not that familiar with it)
The Wikis I have used so far don't expose any HTML syntax to the wiki user. There is a simple Wiki syntax (TextFormattingRules) and I think this is one of the essential aspects of a Wiki. The user doesn't have to deal with a complex markup language and can still create nice-looking HTML pages. That said, I don't think a Wiki is well suited for writing documentation in DocBook/XML.
BTW., it is interesting to see how the CinePaint project deals with similar ideas at the same time...
Sven
WikiWordOfTheDay
From:
WikiWordOfTheDay
Raphaël Quinet wrote:
On Mon, 8 Sep 2003 11:52:10 +0200, David Neary wrote:
Solution: For a given topic, create a wikipage. Make a start on it (sketch paragraphs/sections, basically set up the bare bones of what is needed). And then propose that lots of people make small contributions to it.
We have a wiki (many people might not know that - it's at http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp), which allows just such collaborative effort to take place. [...]
A wiki is nice for drafting some things, but I am not too fond of using it for the help system: it would be OK for discussing some ideas, but not for publishing the final result.
That was my intention in the proposal. The general idea would be to use the wiki as a means of generating docs, not as a way of replacing either www or the help team :) As I said above, it is for collaborative effort in content generation.
A wiki makes it too easy to add lots of WikiWords that remain empty or unmaintained for a long time. Unless there is a strong community interested in keeping the wiki up-to-date and refactoring old entries, many wikis end up being a collection of very valuable contributions mixed with content-free pages. Unfortunately, most visitors do not know which WikiWords are interesting and which ones are not, so it is not always easy for them to find what they are looking for.
Certainly, a bit of discipline is needed. To start with, the front page should have 0 dead end wikiwords. That will happen, but not until the proof of concept (that is, that people will write docs together on this thing) has been proven. I'm willing to put some effort into getting things started, and I have been happy to see a couple of other people embrace the idea (notably Roman Joost, hi Roman), but if it becomes clear in a couple of weeks that I'm wasting my time, then I'll stop, and it will die as an idea :)
One part of making it work is the adoption of the docs generated by the various projects which are more stable in terms of content - the website, developer.gimp.org and the help project. I hope that adoption will happen when the content merits it (or that comments will be added explaining why it doesn't merit it).
Now, don't get me wrong: I like wikis in general. But I doubt that a GIMP wiki will really take off and keep on running for a long time (picture me skeptical about "if you build it, they will come" - or more specifically "they will keep on coming"). We already have enough problems getting contributors for any part of the GIMP (application, plug-ins, help system, web site) so we should be careful about introducing a new area in which people could invest some time.
The interesting thing about the wiki from my point of view is the total divorcing of technology and content. You don't need to know html, xhtml, docbook sgml, docbook xml or any other markup to generate pages which look OK. That means that there's a low barrier of entry. And it makes it easier to contribute docs. Perhaps it'll take off...
A GIMP
wiki can be very useful for discussing drafts and proposing new content that will eventually be migrated to the help system or to the main web site, but the content would have to be migrated over to its destination instead of staying on the wiki. Otherwise, I am afraid that it would sooner or later lose focus.
I think it could be kept in both. But yes, I never intended (nor did I imply) that the wiki should replace the existing content deployment systems.
That's all IMHO, of course. If I am the only dissenting voice, you can ignore me. ;-) In fact, I hope that I am wrong and that we can have a strong community of contributors.
Consider yourself ignored ;-)
Cheers, Dave.
