Boosters Team/Projects/Discoverable centralised documentation

From openSUSE

Purpose

This is one of the two-week sprints of the Boosters Team to gather all the documentation pages in the openSUSE wiki, organize them, and find what is not documented. Think of us as giving a hand to the Wiki Team.

Work done so far

• Category:Navboxes to add navigation boxes to pages with related topics.

Useful meta-pages

• Wiki Team
• All pages
• All categories

Starting points

• Documentation
• Portal

Wiki stuff

• Methodically checking pages
• Layout recommendations for Wikipedia pages
• Editorial oversight and control for Wikipedia
• Be bold from Wikipedia, to encourage contributions rather than passive browsing.
• Help on templates from Wikipedia, an extensive discussion on how to use them.
• Web design advices from marketing veteran Jakob Nielsen.

Ideas

Page full of easy tasks for new contributors

Like the Gnome Love project.

See How to Participate.

• Junior Jobs

openSUSE:Wiki Junior Jobs can be filled with tasks that boil down to go around the wiki and look for irregularities, create list of them and ask for directions, or action by seniors, also collecting information about hard to find content.

Irregularities:

• spam (what is border line when advertising will be considered spam, what is procedure (warn, warn again, delete)
• multiple articles (how to merge, whom to contact (experts for the topic))
• offensive articles (rants, insults, ...)
• obsolete articles (yes, there is one, but it is about version 9.1 and now is 11.2)
• missing articles (check wanted pages, and hand pickup topics as our wiki authors forget to create links to subtopics, or related topics, that will show up in Special:Wantedpages. Notorious examples are console, switch to root, read man page, open browser, etc.)
• reading articles and adding links mentioned above

• Check Meta content:
  • instructions how to edit wiki (there are some, but they are in need for serious rewrite, and that can't be done by 1 person, as it affects each and every editor, so it has to be consent)
  • answers on often asked questions (namespace is FAQ: )

Have wiki pages link to their foreign-language equivalents on the sidebar

Similar to Wikipedia's; this would be useful for people who are not native speakers of English.

Currently we have a combo-box for pages that have translations (see How to Participate as an example page with this feature), but that combo-box is hard to find.

Finding is not as big problem, as it is what we offer there and how easy is to start with translations. There is few questions to answer:

• How to attract new people willing to translate?

We have to streamline translation process. Create wiki with selection of articles from English wiki, and use it as template for new wikis. That will allow translators to work in place by simply editing / translating articles.
Current process is convoluted as it can be, see Translation. Create translation with prefix in english wiki (wich due to structure of those articles is not simple), then translate few more files and send all to person that will setup wiki, then wait some time, and finally you have almost empty wiki to start with.

• How to make sure that after wiki is set up there will be maintainer, sysop, for a long period?

If we can simplify translation there will be more people willing to do that and then more that will stay there. Of course connecting Ambassadors with this can help. Not to translate, but to keep an eye on it and make sure that everyone knows that wiki is needed and that someone has to work on it.