Can't add page to the wiki / making the Wiki more useful

[iamthewalrus]

I have a few suggestions for the wiki:

- Make an obvious "add a page" link. How does one add a page the Wiki? I couldn't figure it out.

- Clean up the main page: I think the Wiki would be more inviting and easier to navigate if the main page only showed links to the main sections and "recently updated", and had all sub-sections and content on seperate pages, including the intro and 'how to participate" etc. because my guess is that the majority of people use the wiki for troubleshooting, not editing.

- Change the font color: the mintgreen font on white background is hard to read

[EIPI]

I agree. The wiki needs an overhaul. Having recently added a couple of entries on it, I can attest to the fact that it's not intuitive. Granted, my impression is jaded by the fact that I am a novice wiki-writer. It's not so hard to reply to posts in the forums and create new threads (after carefully searching, of course :) )... so something better in the wiki ought to be possible.

Recent discussions for more user control (http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13669), sparked by the 'look at me thread' (http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13481), got me into the wiki-ing mood. I would welcome an overhaul of the wiki. Perhaps something we should bring to Reggie's attention.

[TA-t3]

I'm not familiar with ITT's wiki (I really prefer Mediawiki), but the general reason for not having an 'add page' link in a wiki is because that tends to add pages with no links to them (i.e. people won't find them - they just exist).

Instead, (at least in Mediawiki and some others I've used) you create a new page by, from an existing page, adding a keyword (in whatever format the type of wiki uses) which is also a link. Then just visit your newly-updated page and click on that link. Because the page doesn't exist (these are the links showing up in red on e.g. Wikipedia) a new one will be created, and you can start editing it right away.

This ensures that there's something linking to your new page right from the beginning, and you don't end up with orphans as e.g. the old maemo wiki was choke full of.

[GeneralAntilles]

This seems as good a place as any to spark some wiki discussion. I did a big overall to the front page of the wiki this morning, shuffled a lot of stuff off into separate articles and generally made things more organized—it's still pretty messy, though.

Seeing as how the feel-good discussions before about everybody pitching in and contributing to the wiki kinda went nowhere (well, it does look a bit better than it did before), I think it might be time to organize a concerted effort to get the wiki unified, organized, cleaned up, cleaned out, and generally up-to-snuff.*

The problem with many small wikis is the lack of centralized structure and organization planning. As such, I'm asking for some people to step forward and volunteer to help put together a kind of style-guide, and act as copy-editors, spell-checkers, and organizers for the ITT wiki.

I'm interested in contributing to this myself, but a little less so in leading it.† So if somebody wants to step forward to do that, I'd appreciate it as well. If not, I'm OK with doing this in more of a leaderless-collaboration fashion.


*Please speak up if I'm treading on anybody's toes! Just because I haven't noticed any organized efforts, doesn't mean there aren't any. If you're out there, let me know! I'm much more interested in throwing my weight behind something that already has a little energy and organization than trying to duplicate effort starting afresh.

†Somebody with a little more n00b-favor than myself should probably be in the position, anyway.

[GeneralAntilles]

While I'm still in gear:

I'm a big stickler for consistency in form, style, and terminology, which is an area where wikis usually fall apart quite rapidly. So a large part of my interest for whipping the wiki into shape involves defining and unifying these things across the whole of the wiki. Terminology is particularly important for any sort of documentation*, so defining a clear definition of all the terms and their usage is at the top of my list.

Form and style are particularly important to making the wiki easy to read and understand. A clearly defined style will prevent us from having articles all with their own particular organization, look, and design, and make life easier for everybody who reads the wiki.

Probably more important (and more difficult) than the above issues is the overall organization of the wiki. As I mentioned above, I spent some time cleaning up the front page this morning, as it was a bad mashup of a table of contents and a real article. It looks better, but there are still a lot of issues left with the organization on both the wiki-wide and sub-section levels. Thrashing this out shouldn't take too long, but its importance merits a fair amount of thought first.

/me is still pondering.


*Who the hell came up with "2008 OS" and how the hell do I edit article titles?

[aleksandyr]

There are ways to do style enforcing on a wiki-wide basis, and add style tips to the edit page, etc --- probably worth putting together a guide and presenting it to Reggie.

To edit article titles, you move them. Intuitive, ain't it? :D

[GeneralAntilles]

To edit article titles, you move them. Intuitive, ain't it? :D

Kinda what I figured. I was just hoping for something less time-consuming.

[iamthewalrus]

Thanks for the clean-up. There are a few broken links now though. Is there any way to rename links without having to re-enter an article?

[aleksandyr]

Thoughts on titles:

Titles shouldn't have a category prefix: category pages solve that.

If it's a list, call it a list.
"List of Working GPS Devices"

If it's a howto, call it a howto.
"How to customize keyboard keys"

If it's a definition page (as in, encyclopedic) it should be just the thing being defined:
"Geocaching"

If it's device-specific in the title, it shouldn't be. Almost nothing is except for the list of hardware in each device, and the list of software that's known broken for each device. The bug list, also device-specific, is maintained elsewhere.

If it's OS-specific in the title, it shouldn't be. Almost nothing is except for the list of software that's known broken for each device. The bug list, also os-specific, is maintained elsewhere.


Personally I'm in favor of WikiWords like in the maemo wiki, but we seem to have ditched that route.

[EIPI]

Thanks to all for the wiki discussions, recommendations and actions to date!

The style guide, instructions for writing, etc should be the first wiki artlcle !

Just like we have the thanks button, could we not also have a "for the wiki' button on forum posts? These postings would then get tagged to go to the wiki. If we had small wiki-writing team, say 3 people large with a central contact, then these people could stuff that information into the appropriate locations on the wiki if they are deemed appropriate. This would help to enforce style, consistency in terminology, and beefing up the wiki with useful, up-to-date information.

I would volunteer to be a member of this team.

Just a thought.

[krisse]

I agree the wiki does need a lot of work. It's as if someone took a comprehensive reference book, removed 99% of the content at random, and tried to recreate the book from whatever's left.

The wiki is a great idea with occasionally great content, but no one seems to be in charge of the index itself.

Before making any changes someone needs to decide the wiki's intended audience. Is it experienced users, or moderately experienced users, or clueless newbies, or everyone? Whatever the audience is, the index needs to be built round their needs.

At the moment I just can't imagine newbies getting any benefit from it, partly because it doesn't seem to contain any newbie-friendly information, and partly because the wiki's useful content is buried in amongst very unuseful content.

Far too much of it talks about the 770 without discussing the N800 or N810. It's particularly bad when the title sounds general but the tutorial turns out to be 770-specific:

http://www.internettablettalk.com/wiki/index.php?title=HOWTO:_Connect_to_the_Internet_usi ng_Bluetooth_via_a_Windows_PC

There are also very disappointing totally empty stub pages like this which get your hopes up only to dash them:

http://www.internettablettalk.com/wiki/index.php?title=GUIDE:_Everything_about_GSM_Provid ers_%28T-Mobile%2C_Cingular%29_and_DUN

The section titles are also misleading, for example the "beginner's guide" just leads to two articles, neither of which are any use to most newbies:


* Easiest way to install applications on 770 (using Repositories)
* Better search method for Internet Tablet Talk site using Google


There also aren't any apparent criteria for what counts as content at all.

Some of the index goes to blank pages, some redirects to forum threads, some to third party sites, some doesn't really explain anything. Some pages like this:

http://www.internettablettalk.com/wiki/index.php?title=HOWTO:_Connect_to_the_Internet_usi ng_Bluetooth_via_a_Linux_PC

...are just pleas for help, not help itself. What is this page even doing in the wiki?

I don't dare do this myself, but it might be better to strip away things that are clearly no use at all to anyone (such as the link above), and start building the wiki from the ground up entirely out of articles that you know ARE going to be genuinely useful to someone.

It would make the index page look bare, but it would make the index page intuitive and the useful content would become easily accessible.

I know people will say "why don't you quit whining and improve the wiki yourself", but I'm already spending a large chunk of my time doing the Tablet School site and videos, and I honestly don't have the time to do wiki stuff as well.


Just like we have the thanks button, could we not also have a "for the wiki' button on forum posts? These postings would then get tagged to go to the wiki.

I'm not a legal expert but that may cause copyright problems, at least in theory, if you take something someone's written and then publish it unchanged without their permission under a new licence. It might be better to PM the author of a good post and ask if it's okay to put that in the wiki.