It's a MESS!

Solar · Post by **Solar** » Mon Feb 26, 2007 3:17 am

Excuse my french, but I think that the new Wiki is a friggin' MESS!

1) Discussion / style how-to is still all over the place;

2) new Wiki is strongly over-structured, without any way for a newbie to navigate the contents in a meaningful way;

3) it is next to impossible to "quick reference" contents, in parts due to "category abuse", in parts due to poor naming of pages;

4) "educational" cross-links are being taken out in the process of transferring content from the old Wiki.

Elaboration on 3): Usually you want to reference the Wiki from a forum thread. But a short list should make clear why it is next to impossible to quote a Wiki link from memory:

* Category:Babystep
* Tutorial:Babystep1
* Category:Bare_bones_tutorials
* Tutorial:Bare_bones
* Category:Languages
* Languages
* Category:Assembly
* Assembly

Having pages named one way, but linked under a different name (Which Language / Category:Languages) does not help either.

Example on 4): The "BareBones" tutorial assumes that you use a GCC cross-compiler. The old version said so (far too defensively, IMHO). In the new Wiki, the remark was edited out, which means things will break for anyone trying this e.g. with Cygwin.

Suggestions:

Restart the Wiki. Now. Forget all about Category: and Tutorial: until all contents from the old Wiki has been migrated. (Unfortunately, this will now include merging new content with the old one, which is why this should be done now instead of later when we have two full-blown Wikis to merge.)

Forget about extending the new Wiki before all content from the old Wiki has been migrated and the old Wiki has been disabled.

Make an effort to keep page names short, consistend, and intuitive; where possible, keep them identical to the old Wiki. (Bare_bones? Huh?)

Keep discussion on structure etc. in one place, preferrably where people see it. I would suggest removing this whole subforum, and creating a sticky thread "Wiki" in the OS Dev forum. Keep the content of "Discussion" pages strictly on the page in question.

Create a suggested sequence of reading, either by arranging links on the main page, or by providing a "link chain" across introductionary pages.

I'm quite willing to do my part, even while not being able to commit as much time as I did to the old Wiki a couple of months ago. But IMNSHO we have some architectural problems here that require either a restart or at least a complete overhaul of what is there already.

Feedback welcome.

Combuster · Post by **Combuster** » Mon Feb 26, 2007 4:14 am

1) Discussion / style how-to is still all over the place

Agreed. We need [wiki]OSDevWiki:Manual_of_style[/wiki], preferrably in the toolbox.

2) new Wiki is strongly over-structured, without any way for a newbie to navigate the contents in a meaningful way

IMO the old wiki was understructured. I sometimes had to crawl around a lot to find pages like AGP Information. The categories are meant to clean that up, and i dont have any problems finding what i want atm (but maybe that is because i contributed quite a bit myself

)

4) "educational" cross-links are being taken out in the process of transferring content from the old Wiki.

You have the permission to kick me in the (...) if i made such omissions. Its just plain wrong.
If you find such crimes, plz use the talkpage (which will make my rss reader go off so i'll be around to fix it within the next 24 hours) or fix it yourself.

3) it is next to impossible to "quick reference" contents, in parts due to "category abuse", in parts due to poor naming of pages
(...)
Elaboration on 3): Usually you want to reference the Wiki from a forum thread. But a short list should make clear why it is next to impossible to quote a Wiki link from memory:

* Category:Babystep
* Tutorial:Babystep1
* Category:Bare_bones_tutorials
* Tutorial:Bare_bones
* Category:Languages
* Languages
* Category:Assembly
* Assembly

Categories are not meant to contain useful contents. Its one of the reasons why I pulled half the category tree into dispute recently. Category: pages should not be linked. they serve as automatic indexing.
Tutorial: pages contain all tutorials/walkthroughs, all other pages are in the default namespace. It should however be obvious wether a page is tutorial: or not

Forget about extending the new Wiki before all content from the old Wiki has been migrated and the old Wiki has been disabled.

The conversion process has indeed slowed to a crawl. /kick self

However putting a hold on new pages is IMO bad - I think it'll suffice if we prioritize on the merge.

Restart the Wiki. Now. Forget all about Category: and Tutorial: until all contents from the old Wiki has been migrated. (Unfortunately, this will now include merging new content with the old one, which is why this should be done now instead of later when we have two full-blown Wikis to merge.)

Cant we just complete/fix the merge and get it over with? Restarting from scratch sounds too much like a veteran osdever

Keep discussion on structure etc. in one place, preferrably where people see it. I would suggest removing this whole subforum, and creating a sticky thread "Wiki" in the OS Dev forum. Keep the content of "Discussion" pages strictly on the page in question.

IMO this is "one" place, and being a separate forum, new posts dont go unnoticed.

Create a suggested sequence of reading, either by arranging links on the main page, or by providing a "link chain" across introductionary pages.

Introduction page, anyone?

---------------------

There's one thing to be aware of however: This is osdevWIKI, not the osFAQ. For that reason merging the pages while maintaining consistency is difficult. We solved it partly using the Tutorial: namespace, but that doesnt include the FAQ pages. Any suggestions on how to tackle this are still welcome.

In the meantime, a list of type 3/type 4 pages is welcomed.

P.S.: added new template; feel free to poke articles with {{NeedsReview|Topic:13061}} tags

Solar · Post by **Solar** » Mon Feb 26, 2007 4:23 am

There's someone at the other end of the line? Someone real, whom I can talk to?

OK, I admit I missed out on the initial stages of the "new Wiki" process. I agree that the old Wiki had long since grown out of the "FAQ" stage. Is this what you mean when you say "this is the OSDevWiki, not the OSFAQ"? Or do you see a more fundamental difference, as in "above and beyond what we had before"?

I agree that a rework is probably better than a restart.

The conversion process has indeed slowed to a crawl.

Which might be because it's quite hard to help you, since the modus operandi is unclear. Take the "GRUB" page, for example. It contains links to "BareBones", which doesn't exist. Was this to be fixed at a later stage, or an oversight? Should Tutorials:Bare_bones perhaps be renamed to Tutorials:BareBones before the link is fixed, or is the underscore part of "naming policy"?

Combuster · Post by **Combuster** » Mon Feb 26, 2007 4:39 am

Which might be because it's quite hard to help you, since the modus operandi is unclear. Take the "GRUB" page, for example. It contains links to "BareBones", which doesn't exist. Was this to be fixed at a later stage, or an oversight? Should Tutorials:Bare_bones perhaps be renamed to Tutorials:BareBones before the link is fixed, or is the underscore part of "naming policy"?

the _ is a mediawiki thing (spaces get automagically converted to _)

hence GCC Cross-Compiler links to the same page as GCC_Cross-Compiler (as does GCC+Cross-Compiler)

As for the name itself, i'd expect it to be called Tutorial:Barebones (no camelcase, one word)

OK, I admit I missed out on the initial stages of the "new Wiki" process. I agree that the old Wiki had long since grown out of the "FAQ" stage. Is this what you mean when you say "this is the OSDevWiki, not the OSFAQ"? Or do you see a more fundamental difference, as in "above and beyond what we had before"?

That was indeed my point (note that i capitalized WIKI and FAQ there)

There's someone at the other end of the line? Someone real, whom I can talk to?

Contrary to popular belief, we do read this forum

I'll wait a bit for jhawthorn to see what he has to say on it (my guess is that he finds this thread within 24 hours)

AJ · Post by AJ » Mon Feb 26, 2007 5:18 am

Combuster wrote:

2) new Wiki is strongly over-structured, without any way for a newbie to navigate the contents in a meaningful way
IMO the old wiki was understructured.

Agree with both of you on this. Purely from an 'End User' point of view, the old FAQ was vastly understructured, but the new WIKI has taken structure to its extreme - finding an article is not always entirely intuitive.

I can see that the solution to finding a balance is not an easy one though. Expandable tree, anyone

?

Cheers,
Adam

Solar · Post by **Solar** » Mon Feb 26, 2007 5:38 am

Well, I for one wouldn't make use of the namespaces (Tutorial:) at all, since they become part of the URL, so you have to remember whether an article was a tutorial or not in order to give its URL without having to look it up first...

Discussion pages are a very involved thing. Yes, they are much used by Wikipedia, but not everyone uses Wikipedia (beyond looking at articles, that is), and I remember finding the concept pretty confusing at first. It's also more complicated than necessary to find out what a discussion entry referred to when the article has been changed already. The need for discussion on a specific article on the old Wiki was rather low, and usually settled with a forum post or a note in the article itself without much hassle.

Most unfortunate is that we haven't migrated everything from the old Wiki yet. I gather migrating the article itself isn't that difficult to do, but finding all the dangling references (especially when page names changed) and finding where to link the new page isn't trivial. (I want to migrate "Segmentation", is that "Hardware" or "OS Theory" or a subarticle of "Memory Management"?)

I suggest migrating the content of the old Wiki ASAP, perhaps into a temporary namespace of its own, and disabling the old Wiki. Having two of them around massively adds to the confusion, IMHO.

pulsar · Post by **pulsar** » Mon Feb 26, 2007 11:02 am

Forget all about Category: and Tutorial: until all contents from the old Wiki has been migrated

i have to stress it, because i have been waiting over a long time to see the old wiki pages get translated.

Alboin · Post by **Alboin** » Mon Feb 26, 2007 4:16 pm

Hopefully not going too off topic (Or whatever was going on...): What about doing something like Wikipedia? Where instead of listing every page in the index, you just have a search bar that you use? I've never had much difficulty finding pages on Wikipedia. (That is, with the assistance of Google.) Just a thought...

Solar · Post by **Solar** » Mon Feb 26, 2007 10:30 pm

Wikipedia is organized by Lemma. Doesn't work for OS DEV - very few newbies to Cygwin GCC development know that a "Cross-Compiler" is a good thing for them, just for example.

Tyler · Post by **Tyler** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 1:15 pm

I have to agree with Solar, we have not really structured the wiki well as of yet. I think we need to move every article over from the old wiki, intact. We then need restructure the entire site and begin discussing what to include and how to split all of the old articles in order to maintain a good wiki. If it continues as is, i see it becoming far less useful.

jhawthorn · Post by **jhawthorn** » Fri Mar 02, 2007 2:31 am

@Tyler: That to me sounds synonymous with the "just finish it. then fix it later." style. Personally (though I'm sure most will agree), I find that "later" is never "now" and I would never fix the barely converted pages. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

pulsar wrote: Forget all about Category: [...] until all contents from the old Wiki has been migrated

No. The "Category:" namespace is an integral part of how a MediaWiki structures its self. The OSFAQ also had categories. Only they were not in a separate namespace (MediaWiki does not work this way). In my opinion, Categories do belong in their own namespace as their functionality is vastly different from a regular article.

Solar wrote:Well, I for one wouldn't make use of the namespaces (Tutorial:)

The "Tutorial:" namespace is a different story. I birthed it one night at around 3 a.m. and even then I had second thoughts. It was a bad idea. It is terrible for being linked to or found. However, it has not been changed as some form of separation between tutorial articles and regular articles needs to exist (IMO, of course).

Solar wrote:Most unfortunate is that we haven't migrated everything from the old Wiki yet. I gather migrating the article itself isn't that difficult to do, but finding all the dangling references (especially when page names changed) and finding where to link the new page isn't trivial.

Would it help if a template was created so that

Code: Select all

{{Convert|Allocating and Freeing Memory}}

would expand to

This page is to be converted from the OSFAQ page Allocating and Freeing Memory

A new page could be created with this as its contents for each missing page.

As for organization, I, like Combuster, have fallen victim of being familiar with the wiki's organization and failing to recognize its flaws. I would love to hear what Solar feels would repair these flaws. Surely restarting is not worth the effort that could be put into repair. I have seen many pages have a huge improvement over the OSFAQ counterparts.

Solar · Post by **Solar** » Fri Mar 02, 2007 4:44 am

OK, startover is out of the question then.

But I feel that jhawthorn is outvoted with regards to the "finish first, fix later" approach. Right now we have two Wikis on the same subject, both being crippled (the new one because it does not have all the content from the old one and being a bit chaotic yet, the old one because it's locked).

My suggestion still is to migrate now, re-organize later. It will lead to more chaos in the new Wiki for some time, but at least we would have one Wiki again with which people work, and a Wiki being used is usually improved on pretty fast.

As for the Convert template, no I don't think it would help. It would add links and references and dependencies, but wouldn't get anything done. If you already know which old page should be migrated to which new one, migrate it, don't add a stub. What would help are markers for pages that still require their syntax fixed, their links fixed, or being categorized, so you can migrate a page ad-hoc even if you don't have the time to get all the flaws fixed.

"Later never comes" is true in many fields of software engineering. It isn't so true for a Wiki.

When we have all the stuff moved across, we can still hammer out the fine print of how the new Wiki should be structured. It will change over time, anyway, as any Wiki does.

Tyler · Post by **Tyler** » Fri Mar 02, 2007 12:08 pm

jhawthorn wrote:@Tyler: That to me sounds synonymous with the "just finish it. then fix it later." style. Personally (though I'm sure most will agree), I find that "later" is never "now" and I would never fix the barely converted pages. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

My apoloises, i should have work on explaining my meaning. The reason for the move is not for sake of content. It was more the ability to then use discussion to discuss where each page will fit into the new site. Helping all partys get a better feel for how we think content should be split, or collected.

jhawthorn · Post by **jhawthorn** » Fri Mar 02, 2007 9:02 pm

Tyler wrote:My apoloises, i should have work on explaining my meaning. The reason for the move is not for sake of content. It was more the ability to then use discussion to discuss where each page will fit into the new site. Helping all partys get a better feel for how we think content should be split, or collected.

Oh, my mistake. That's a very good reason for moving the pages immediately.

Tyler wrote:My suggestion still is to migrate now, re-organize later. It will lead to more chaos in the new Wiki for some time, but at least we would have one Wiki again with which people work, and a Wiki being used is usually improved on pretty fast.

I can't argue with that at all. You've changed my mind. As long as the converted pages are clearly marked (I'll make a template in a minute) there is no reason not to convert every page immediately.

EDIT: Made a template to mark quickly converted pages (feel free to improve)
[wiki]Template:Convert[/wiki]

Tyler · Post by **Tyler** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 4:40 am

Now i have a confession as to why i posted it here and haven't atarted doing it... i wouldn't know where to start on conversion. Unless you all do it manually in which case id be happy to give it a good couple hours work, but you shold find an automated method!