Re: Re: The wiki

Nuno Silva <[email protected]> writes:

> In this case, I'd say a possible issue might be commit messages, 
> because
> these are not easily amendable.

Yeah, i agree that this is an issue. i'm not a fan of the fact 
that, when i accidentally hit "enter" while typing a commit 
message, which i've done several times over the last few years, i 
just have to leave the message as it is, unless i want to revert 
the whole commit, which feels A Bit Excessive.

> This being fully web-based on the wiki will always feel, at 
> least to me,
> clunkier than the previous approach where discussion could be 
> had in
> bugzilla (well, I suppose that's still possible now? I did at 
> least once
> file a documentation bug already in the wiki era).

Discussions on bugs.gentoo.org (b.g.o) regarding the wiki should 
be mainly about the wiki infrastructure/software/UI/UX, not about 
the _contents_ of a given page. To discuss possible changes to a 
page, the associated Talk page (labelled 'Discussion' in the nav 
bar just above the beginning of the page) should be used. Here's 
an example:

  https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Talk:Podman#Potential_security_issues_in_.22Rootless_containers_under_OpenRC.22_setup

(i should note, however, that the Talk page is _not_ for general 
discussion about the topic of the page. For example, it shouldn't 
be used to debate the pros and cons of a piece of software, like 
"Podman sucks, Incus rocks.")

> A good thing to have in the toolset for wiki editing are 
> features to go
> after old revisions, diff them, copy them to your user 
> namespace. In
> fact, if the edits here are not consensual, or create confusion, 
> I
> suppose a wiki-ish way to handle it may be to copy the article 
> to the
> user namespace and work on it there, linking to 
> [[Special:Diff/...]](1)
> in the talk page for the "main" article, or in other discussion 
> venues
> (mailing lists, IRC)
>
> (1) In this case, something like
> <https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Special:Diff/1440730>, but I mean 
> linking
> to a draft in your user namespace. Also, if you do this in your
> namespace, you can also later diff between two different 
> articles to see
> which changes do you still have to apply to the article in the 
> main
> namespace, as MediaWiki has syntax to accept two oldids for 
> diffing, no
> matter the article they're from.

Yes, for particularly major changes, i think this is a good 
approach, especially if there's some potential for the proposed 
changes to cause debate.

i did a major overhaul of the "s6" page - which is not a small 
page! - by first doing it in the 'drafts' namespace i created 
under my User namespace. (It's now been moved to the main 
namespace.)

Drafts can be linked to from the Talk page of the page being 
worked on, so that discussion about the proposed changes can 
happen there. Discussing it on the Talk page for the draft itself 
is not necessarily a good idea, as interested parties - those who 
have previously edited the current page, and those who have 
manually added it to their Watchlist - might miss the discussion.

There's no hard-and-fast rule for what constitutes a 'particularly 
major' or a 'minor' change. But to me, "page overhaul" belongs in 
the former category, while the latter category is for "fix a 
typo", "make page source layout more consistent", etc - something 
that hasn't made any substantive changes to the content provided 
by the page.

> (At least I'm assuming this is MediaWiki. Has its looks and 
> behaves like
> it, but I didn't check.)

You're correct. :-)

> (Also, is it really necessary to hide the page history link 
> behind a JS
> menu? I can come up with a CSS override, but it still looks 
> overkill.)

Can't speak to that one, but that's the sort of thing that i feel 
would be appropriate to open an issue on b.g.o about, since it 
involves the wiki UI, rather than the contents of a specific page.


Alexis.