Wiki development discussions

[RHorning]

I would like to know where a discussion area can be that can refer to the development and creation of articles for the "official" Bitcoins wiki can take place?

There are several schools of thought, where perhaps the discussion of the wiki articles can take place on the wiki itself or it can have its own forum.  What I'm referring to here, however, are "meta" discussion such as editorial policies, style guides, and ontological discussions that cover how to simply organize all of the information on the various pages, and even "deletion" discussions.

Considering the nature of how the current wiki software works that has been adopted by this project, it would seem like a separate forum section would be preferable for these kind of discussions.  For now a simple stickied "Wiki organization threat" might be all that is needed considering the volume of edits but that could change over time.

I'm not trying to force any particular idea as the best, but I would like to know what is preferred by those who would like to participate with the wiki development, and note that I would like to be adding a whole bunch more content onto the wiki as well.

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[Insti]

I've also been thinking about this.

Can we just create a meta: namespace on the wiki?

meta:wiki_discussion
meta:style_guidelines
meta:pages_that_need_improvement

etc.

At least discussing stuff in this thread is a start.

[RHorning]

Can we just create a meta: namespace on the wiki?

This is certainly an option.  Keeping the discussion on the forums would allow other forum users to keep track of what is happening on the wiki at a glance even if they aren't active on the wiki, but then again it is relying on off-wiki organization too.

One of the problems with this particular wiki software is that it doesn't have all of the nice organizational tools that MediaWiki has, including dedicated discussion pages for each article.  It also doesn't have separate genuine namespaces in terms of article searches and content separation, so it is also a mostly ad-hoc organization that would have to be made here.

I don't care what the organization might be, but we do need to get a decision down in terms of what system we are going to be using for this.  It is also something that I don't feel comfortable simply making a decision on my own authority (which is none at all), and whatever we are going to be using may involve some "outside" assistance to get it going.

[Insti]

Either way is good for me, I seem to spend all day hitting refresh on both unread forum posts and wiki changes anyway.

Perhaps we should use the Development & Technical Discussion forum and prefix all our subjects with "Wiki:"

If we end up with too many threads they'll give us a subforum.

[sirius]

Do you think we should switch to MediaWiki? Better support for translations and discussions, and most people are familiar with it. Originally I chose DokuWiki because of its easy installation and lightweightness.

[RHorning]

Do you think we should switch to MediaWiki? Better support for translations and discussions, and most people are familiar with it. Originally I chose DokuWiki because of its easy installation and lightweightness.

Given my person choice, I would recommend it, but you do need to consider how active the wiki community may get.  If we are going to be developing significant documentation and having that documentation be referenced from a number of 3rd party websites, I would strongly suggest MediaWiki.  If all we are going to be doing is compiling FAQs and having it be more of a supplement to the forums, the existing software works out just fine.

Where I think MediaWiki would really come in handy would be in the area of page protection levels and the use of templates.  Flagged revisions could also be useful in terms of specification documents, although other approaches could be used to accomplish the same basic task.  It should also be noted that MediaWiki doesn't necessarily require anonymous user contributions by default, and such a feature can certainly be "turned off" if that is desired (such as is the current behavior for the existing wiki).