Re: New DevMo Roadmap and Progress

Nickolay Ponomarev wrote:

> However, having article names like "JavaScript:References:Core
> JavaScript 1.5 Reference:Objects:Array" strikes me as not really a good
> idea. It defeats one of main concepts of wiki, accidental linking (when
> one doesn't have to use the pipe syntax), makes it hard to move a page
> in docs hierarchy (so it's crucial to get the hierarchy right *now*)
> and makes mediawiki categories
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Category> close to useless (though
> it looks like you're not going to use them anyways).

We'll be using Categories.  As far as I know, categories are a totally 
independent system from any form of page naming.  I could be mistaken on 
this, but I was under the impression that any page could be put into any 
number of categories, simply by adding the category tags to the page. 
Categories could then be nested and linked by adding them to each other, 
and so forth.

I'm not sure why you think the pagename heirarchy would render this 
useless, but I might have missed something when researching the category 
features.

Accidental linking is great, I agree, but if someone links [[function]], 
things get hairy, fast -- do they mean the function statement, or the 
function object?  Do they even mean to link to something within the 
JavaScript side of things, or to something else entirely?  Page names 
have to be unique enough so this doesn't happen, which means they have 
to include enough information that people know exactly what they're 
linking to...thus JavaScript:Reference:Core Reference:Objects:Function. 
  Even removing the Reference:Core Reference part would be problematic, 
in that someone may create a Pocket Reference, and someone else might 
write about the Function object in one of the Guides or somesuch.

It is definitely something to try to minimize, but I think the only 
place that the page names will get really problematic is in the 
book-length manuals.  An article about JavaScript, for example, would be 
  something like [[JavaScript:Articles:This is an Article about 
JavaScript]].

If anyone has a better solution for ensuring no namespace collisions 
between pages while also allowing for a bit of heirarchy (the 
breadcrumbs system currently works of the pagenames, but could be rigged 
to read off something else, I suppose), please let me know.

> What's even more important, the wiki source of some pages becomes
> unreadable, see
> <http://developer-test.mozilla.org/docs/index.php?title=JavaScript:References:Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference&action=edit>
> or
> <http://developer-test.mozilla.org/docs/index.php?title=JavaScript:References:Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference:Objects:Array&action=edit&section=14>
> for example.

I don't find that particularly unreadable.  It's not ideal by any means, 
but once you get the hang of eyeing the wikimedia markup, it's 
relatively straightforward, I think.  One of the tricks I use is to do 
my markup in a separate text editor, then just copy/paste it in.  For 
minor changes, it can take a min to orient yourself within the linking 
code, true.

Again, if there's a better solution available, I'd love to know about it.

> I understand that this project is huge and using short article titles
> may not work in your case. I'm just saying, I don't see much point in
> making it *that* hard to create any links.

It's a tradeoff.  Accidental linking is very difficult when there is 
room for ambiguity (such as between the function object and statement). 
  Technical documentation simply doesn't afford us the luxury of that 
ambiguity.

> filesystem/url-like shortcuts, like [[.:blah]] for links to a "sibling"
> article and [[..]] for a "parent" article

Possibly, and definitely something to look into.  Good suggestion for a 
MediaWiki extension, I think.

>, and (2) makes the displayed
> title of article be the "leaf name".

Yah, we're already looking into something like this -- displaying the 
full pagename at the top of the page is problematic.  I think we'll be 
able to make an extension to do something like what you're suggesting.

> I'm not a PHP person, but from
> what I've seen in mediawiki, they don't have support for these kinds of
> extensions, so it will cause problems when you need to upgrade wiki
> software.

MediaWiki does support extensions.  The breadcrumb stuff we have has 
been written as an extension, which lives in the "extensions/" directory 
of the MediaWiki installation, and is simply included via the 
LocalSettings.php file.  They should not impede the software upgrade 
path at all, so long as any addons we write are done similarly.

> Also from our experience at MZ wiki, dividing information into FAQs and
> Tips (as you suggest on your user page) makes the information harder to
> find by navigating wiki. FAQs should not be a branch in the hierarchy,
> but a special manually maintained page. All articles that are put in
> FAQs should have a real place in the hierarchy. Just sharing
> experience.

That makes sense.  Thanks :)

> btw, pardon my ignorance, who are the devmo drivers? fantasai and Deb?

There are currently 20 people on the devmo-drivers@ mailing list, 
including several staff and foundation people.  Fantasai and I are two 
of the more active members, but discussion there was quite brisk while 
hammering out some of the arguments for and against wikis and so forth.

~ deb