[Bf-committers] Wiki reorganization proposal

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi,

One thing that this proposal doesn't focus on much, is how to get this
effort organized. And I don't mean so much guidelines, but who is going
to lead it, and how you're going to attract people to do the work. I
think it is important to make things more transparent and inviting,
which means:

* Regularly publish what has happened and open tasks for people to
participate in, on blenderartists or blendernation for example.

* A point of access for people wanting to participate. A mailing list,
forum or even personal e-mail address for people who want to get
involved should be there and _responsive_. Of course there are the
blender.org forums, #blenderwiki, and bf-docboard but the point is that
there should be at least 1 person who is actually following that and can
answer questions and distribute tasks.

* As mentioned, ideally no restricted editing rights.

On Sat, 2009-01-10 at 15:53 +0000, mindrones wrote:
> after talking with some of the people involved in wiki,
> I've written a proposal to reorganize the actual wiki 
> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Mindrones/blender-wiki/proposal
> and posted in docboard mailing list.

Doc/Ext/Dev/Org/Meta/Attic make sense to me. The "theory" thing could be
interesting but I would advise to only make website section if you know
it is going to be filled and maintained. I think it would be good to
move _a lot_ of stuff to the attic. It's not because someone invested
effort that it should be very precious, if it's old, outdated or very
incomplete then it should be moved there in my opinion, with a clear
warning. That applies to easily 50% of the front page table of contents.

I think it is more useful to do less better, and move a lot to the attic
and move it back only when it meets some obvious quality criteria
(though there can be redirects of course to not break links).

> Now it is based on workflow (how informations flow to and from wiki)
> and it's awfully long :)
> 
> It would help a lot to hear suggestions from committers, so that we can
> put down a list of priorities (most useful/easier things first).

I think things that add more _maintenance_ work should be low priority.
Things that require effort to keep updated in fact may do more harm than
good if they are not kept updated, and this a big problem with the wiki
now. If you click a link you have no idea if it is going to lead you to
anything interesting or even correct still. 

There is already enough work to get the wiki organized better with the
current information that it tries to provide. So in my opinion these
things are not important and perhaps are better to leave out even.

* Tagging and semantic wiki: can't we first try to organize the wiki so
you can actually find things by looking at the table of contents?

* Organizing feature requests: blenderstorm?

* Overview of tagged commits in the wiki: too much maintenance with no
clear purpose over just reading bf-blender-cvs.

* Trackers for scripts: not really a job for the wiki, if someone wants
to organize this better that is fine .. but better to not mix that in
here.

* Tracker for blend files: too much work and will be outdated and
incomplete quickly.

* Page scheme: if the existing pages are properly formatted copy-paste
works just fine.

* Read wiki inside Blender.

* Imagemaps to navigate manuals from Blender screenshots: to much work
too maintain.

* Section map: not that useful.

Brecht.