Hi Krzysztof,
Don't take it personal please, I think your making an argument "ad hominen" with mediawiki used by thousands projects. There are others that not.
Nothing is technically broken so we shouldn't fix it. I can see, browse everything at inkscape.org, everything? not sure, because site search uses google and at this moment shows no results if I look up for "filters". If I search for "filters" there are no Page title matches If I search for "effects" the second one in Page title is "filter effects", that is not how a search engine in 2010 works and Dokuwiki search is more intelligent than this.
A user doesn't know if he or she is missing something and we cannot guarantee with actual deployment he or she will reach information properly. One part of interesting information is spread over a wiki and we should handle this: wiki gardening and moving everything stable to actual structured documentation, browseable and searchable.
Just to make this clear, I have been in Open Source communities for 10 years and I don't want this thread a drupal, mediawiki, whatever FLOSS, bashing.
Also, I don't think it's necessary to remind software has lifecycles, niche, bumps and so.
As someone says in this thread, there is a good momentum (meaning willing people) to create a nice community and documentation website for Inkscape. Some of us are not C++ coders so we will be pretty happy with python-django-js/html/css-sql migrating helping.
I can agree with you in planning this into stages: 1st, main site, then everything else and I think this is how we are going to do it anyway. Although it doesn't hurt to have the whole picture.
On the wiki syntax part, in my opinion you are not approaching the problem from a non-hard-core-wiki documentator perspective. Adding images to wiki is odd and loose linking can make big damage (e.g. Link to "Effect" page and "effect" page)
Also, I didn't say website documentators must learn reST, but it should be the common language, so in the website you write with a WYSIWYG and stuff is stored or ultimatelly converted to reST. It was only a suggestion anyway.
Just one __not personal__ thought, when you say
while your custom system would have only 1 user (inkscape.org) and 1 maintainer (you)
It looks to me you haven't developed with Django or any framework alike (RoR), if I'm not wrong I suggest you to have a look and see how this is not like building your own site from scratch.
Just for more django evangelization: http://www.openshotvideo.com/2010/10/new-openshot-website-launched.html
And my last words :) I would like to work these holidays too on this, I hope this aspects are settled down by someone because I am not going to argue/evangelize anymore. Just waiting for meetings or tasks assigment and moving forward.
Cheers, n3storm
El 19/12/10 18:22, Krzysztof Kosiński escribió:
I thought some more about this and I see we are quickly entering bogus-land.
Chris& other "let's change everything" people: *what is the point* of spending a lot of time on migrating all the information to some different wiki-like system that uses a different syntax, has different features and different everything? There is nothing of substance to gain. We end up with same not very well organized information, but this time in a custom system that might not have all the features we had in MediaWiki and has a different a syntax. MediaWiki is used by thousands of projects and has a lot of people working on it, while your custom system would have only 1 user (inkscape.org) and 1 maintainer (you). We are not in the business of writing and maintaining wiki software. Furthermore, many more people are familiar with wikisyntax than reST.
Single sign on is the only real advantage your solution would have, but instead of removing MediaWiki you can just use one of the authentication plugins for MediaWiki. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CASAuthentication http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AuthDrupal https://bitbucket.org/toml/django-mediawiki-authentication/src
You essentially want to spend a lot of time to make something possibly inferior. WHY? Forget about the wiki for now, it's not broken. In fact, it would work extremely well if it had a better skin (e.g. the default one!). Fix the main site first, then we can start talking about the wiki.
To sum up my points:
- Don't try to fix things that work very well.
- Standing on the shoulders of giants is good.
- Fix the main site first.
Regards, Krzysztof
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