Portal:Wiki

Welcome to the Wiki Portal edit

The openSUSE wiki is the source of information about the openSUSE project and distribution.

The goal is to provide high quality documentation and a place for collaboration on all parts of the project. This is done in a well structured, standardized and easy readable way. Content is created, edited and refined by all community members.

Concept edit

Wiki> Content guidelines

Concept - Namespace - Editing - Style - Portal - Template - Category - Icon - Adding Video - Cheat sheet - To do

Structure

The content in this wiki is separated by topic in a couple of groups called namespaces that correspond to few basic interests that wiki visitors and users have when they look for the wiki. Three main groups are:

Project and distribution presentation:
- Location: It is in the Main namespace; the one where articles titles have no prefix.
- Topic: It is a presentation space for the latest release of the openSUSE Distribution and related parts of the project. Think of it as the product brochure where is described product and its components.
- Audience: People who are new to openSUSE and maybe to Linux in general.
Support Database (SDB):
- Location: It is in the SDB namespace; the one where articles are prefixed with SDB: .
- Topic: It is dedicated to support topics, like miscellaneous installation instructions (different working, but not supported ways to install or upgrade openSUSE distribution), installation of third party applications that are not part openSUSE, but a lot of its users want them, configuration of software, services and hardware that is not fully supported in a distribution, workarounds for the most annoying bugs.
- Audience: People who have a problem installing and running the openSUSE distribution in general, or some of its components, and seek written instruction on how to solve it.
Volunteers (contributors):
- Location: It is in the openSUSE namespace; the one where article titles have openSUSE: prefix.
- Topic: It is dedicated to all that teams of volunteers (contributors) need, from work files, team introduction, plans, meeting minutes, to do lists, etc.
- Audience: Volunteers contributing to openSUSE.

There are few more namespaces with special purpose. This structure should provide separation of tools (MediaWiki extensions) used on per namespace basis, and with help of wiki categories, easy way to find what wiki visitor is looking for.

Navigation

Navigation happens through means common to any wiki, but there are also portals. Portals are entry points for a specific topic, similar to the main page. They provide an overview over a topic and guide readers to the content they seek which is either another portal or an individual article. Also categorization is very important for our wiki navigation, making it possible to automatically generate overview pages and navigational structures. With these rules for navigation we ensure that our readers find the content we produce.

Styling

Styling of content happens through templates. There are two kinds, templates for a specific kind of article like the general article template, the one for Portals or for support database articles and templates for styling of recurring content in articles like introduction and info boxes, hints and instructions or external sources and items. With these rules about styling we ensure that people understand the content we produce.

Quality assurance

Prominent namespaces in this wiki are subject to a quality assurance (QA) process to ensure articles meet the required quality. This QA process happens via a system of page validation which provides the opportunity to have several revisions of articles in parallel and one approved by the Wiki team. It does not limit creation of new content, but allows only quality content to be shown by default. With this process we ensure that first time visitors get drawn into page and stay.

Translation

Important part of our concept is that wiki content must be accessible to people that can't use English to read or contribute to the articles. We have multiple wiki translation projects running and we will add more when openSUSE communities using different languages are strong enough to perform the translation and later continue with a regular wiki maintenance.

We also have a multilingual wiki that can be used to start initial translation of mandatory articles in order to create translated wikis, or to translate only few articles.

Topics edit

Adding Content - If you want to contribute more than the usual typo-fix or small update for an existing article the following pages will help you to understand how we work in this wiki.

Editing help - Everything about editing articles in this wiki.
Styling help - Everything about styling articles in this wiki.
Namespaces - Group articles for the right target audience.
Templates - Standardized texts you can include on pages.
Icons - Standard icons you can use on pages.
Categories - Group articles according to their theme.

Wiki Maintenance - If you want to help us to maintain this wiki by keeping it organized, standardized and readable you should additionally read the following pages.