Hi both,

some background:

• Discussions about closing the Wiki surfaced because it was running (mostly unmaintained) on a server maintained by OSUOSL (and they expressed interest in shutting that server down). One idea was to migrate to GitLab Wikis instead (because that was readily available without the need to set-up anything from our side).
  However multiple people (including me) voted against GitLab Wikis, because *every* project on GitLab can have a Wiki, so information would be scattered and impossible to find. Also the GitLab Wikis lack a lot of functionality compared to the wide-spread and well-known MediaWiki software that runs on wiki.inkscape.org (it's the software that runs Wikipedia!)
  Also, we've migrated the Wiki to our own server since then and updated it, so the original issue that made us question it's existence is resolved.
• Brynn is right that user-facing docs should be on the Website, mostly because it's the primary entry point for new users and because it can (and is supposed to be) translated, whereas we expect developers to speak English (code is English after all). However editing is not always as straightforward as it could be and Martin isn't happy with the CMS, so actually there are some ideas to change how content on the website is maintained going forward. It won't change however (at least as far as I interpret the situation) *what* content is maintained on the website. That means user-facing content will stay on the website and will continue to be translated.
• "Developer-facing" documentation on the other hand is primarily kept on the Wiki. That's because it is easy and quick to edit, has good search capabilities, versioning, etc. - stuff that is important for the short-lived nature of developer-facing documentation, which at the same time makes it mostly unsuitable for the website itself.
  One important thing to note is that "developer-facing" does not only mean people working on code, but this includes extension authors, translators, packagers and other "technical" folks, i.e. most of the topics Victor mentioned. Basically everything that does not need to "look nice" but needs to be properly documented somewhere.
  

One interesting question is if we could combine both (website and wiki) in future. Martin had some thoughts about grabbing the content from the wiki and embed it into the website, which could be nice as it would unify the way articles are written, but this is still some way in the future...

Cheers
Patrick

Hi Brynn, thank you for all the info you provided.

The question that remains is: there are a lot of info for developers, which is good, of course.

But not everyone is a developer. We all understand the more developers we have for our project, the better.

But we also need to encourage our user base to grow, specially to convert part of our user base into volunteers. We can always use more hands/brains!

But (sorry for the 3rd but in a row) we need to make sure we have some sort of place to point new users on how to start translating things (we have decent material today, but we could improved things (at least on the Windows aspect/users side of things))

And I am lacking a place where our users could read more about specific things they could help the project (translating inkscape interface, translating tutorials, translating the website, onboarding more people to help with bug triaging, ideas to redesign interface, and so forth...).

What do you think?

Happy new year!

Thanks,
Victor

On Sun, Dec 29, 2019 at 11:07 PM brynn <brynn@frii.com> wrote:

As far as I understand, when the current website started to be developed
(approx 5 years ago) the website was to be groomed towards users and the
wiki was going to be groomed to be development-facing.

So putting any articles benefitting users in the wiki would not be
appropriate.

This sounds like it might be a borderline case, where an article on how
to write themes and create icons sets would benefit both developers and
users.  Perhaps such an article should be cross posted - both in the
wiki and in the gallery?  (Although such an article would need to be
written in 2 different ways - one in developer-speak, and the other
which non-tech-savy users could understand....)

As far as the GitLab repo, while I have not heard anything about which
group it's meant to serve, to me, GL is primarily for developers as well.

It seems like I heard a whisper, maybe 3 or even 4 years ago, about
wanting to close the wiki.  I don't remember what was supposed to
replace it, but GL had not been mentioned at that time.  As far as I
understand, GL has a wiki, doesn't it?

Yep, that's alls I know :p

Happy New Year!

brynn

On 12/29/2019 11:08 PM, Victor Westmann wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I was just taking a look at Blender's Wiki
> (https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Main_Page) and I was happy to identify
> they are using a similar wiki engine as we are. But I also noticed that
> they have a more modern (beautiful?) visual than we do. Is this
> something we are able to implement in our wiki as well?
>
> Besides this... are we going to revamp our wiki and centralize
> documentation material in it? Or are we going to readthedocs? Or are we
> going to centralize our efforts in the Gitlab wiki feature? Please let
> me know.
>
> I am really excited to read the article on how to write themes and icon
> sets for inkscape 1.x once it is ready.
>
> Thanks,
> Victor
>
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