Dan Carlson schrieb:
The main problem from my perspective is documentation
for users of
the wiki software in sites which are not straight-up mirrors of
Wikipedia.
I agree. That's the reason why I started to restructure and rewrite the
documentation (
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation).
The problem with the current official documentation
(
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User's_Guide) is, that it's
not a "User's Guide", but more of a mixture of Installation,
Configuration, User's, Administrator's, and partial even Developer's
Guide. According to MediaWiki terminology, a "User" is also an
administrator; however, it will take the normal user some time to
distinguish this wording.
I'm trying to write documents for different targeted users; people, who
want to know what MediaWiki is, should read a mostly non-technical
overview (
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation:_Introduction);
people who want to write articles should read the User's Guide
(
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation:_User's_Guide)ide), explaining
how to edit and write pages; people who want to set up a MediaWiki site
should read the Administrator's Guide
(
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation:_Administrator's_Guide)ide),
explaining hw to install and confugure the software, and so on. These
documents have to be structured from the scratch, be written for
different levels of experience, and stay focused for specific tasks
related to the work of these target groups.
But, considering that the MediaWiki software is made
publicly
available for download and for establishing other websites, I wonder
if it might be useful to have some kind of help "module" -- that is,
a collected copy of the documentation pages that can be easily copied
and set up on other sites. Possibly, this could also add a new
"Help:" namespace which would help distinguish those pages for the
general users.
Nice idea. But do we want another namespace?
Greetings, -asb