A Wiki Effort Suggestion

[charles]

Apparently the Wiki Documentation Effort can be viewed by everyone, but making additions is only open only to Team Members or a select few approved contributors. I understand this need so as to create a quality Documentation vs. a 'free for all'. How about this?

 

In addition to the plea for people to take on topics for the Documentation, how about a second, Open To All Members Wiki, which could be considered as a non-credited seed bed for documentation which is for that purpose only and no criticism or philosophical debate regarding content allowed? Only documentation entries and no contributor deletions of other entries allowed, seconded or not. It would be like an open forum authoring work in progress.

 

It could be called the Open Forum For Editing Repository Wiki and all community members would have an OFFER (offer) Wiki to join and offer input. The closed team Wiki could be called the Author Contributed Progressive Team Documentation Wiki of ACPTD (accepted) Wiki contributions. In short, there would be an OFFER Wiki and an ACPTD Wiki.

 

The community understanding would be that Team Members or a specific assigned team member (either volunteered or appointed) could and would be responsible for Editing Documents In The Offered Repository. In short, the Wiki EDITOR, would then review the OFFER'd Wiki Efforts, compile and edit them as is seen fit, and then place that Composite Documentation under the appropriate heading on the Non-Editable Team Members Effort as ACPTD Wiki Official Documentation.

 

Of course, the drawback is that there would be no specific author to recieve credit for those topics authored that way, but the documentation might get written faster, be more complete and contributors would know they were not getting specific credit up front but had contributed, in general, to the OSCommerce effort, to which many people appear to be fiercely loyal.

 

Any community member seeking authoring credit could still independently apply with you to engage in the Wiki process and could also choose to access all entries on a topic in the open OFFER Wiki, compile them for submission, and so, recieve credit because they did the hard work of researching and sorting through all the entries to produce the edited ACPTD Wiki Official Documentation entry.

 

The theory here is that many community members may feel daunted that their contributions might not be accepted as worthy, and so, are self concious about contributing if they have to apply for participation. But, if allowed to OFFER contributions freely in bits and pieces, think of the power of the ACPTD Wiki collective mind.

 

What brought this up is that I see the point of difference between knowledge base and documentation, however, I have reviewed the 50 entries made in the Wiki forum since it was started back in April. For the first two months it seemed to work fairly well. Also, recently, Melinda Odom has been doing a wonderful job of updating the OSC Wiki. But, I've noticed several things about the Wiki forum:

 

1) Input efforts in that forum have steadily deteriorated so that now, on the 1st of the three Wiki forum pages (the most recent posts), the majority of the posts are questions posted off topic. Those questions would be better posted in the forum appropriate to their subject.

 

2) I can find no instructions or comments on the Wiki Effort page or anywhere else directing people to place knowledge base input on the Wiki Forum as a spring board open for debate and further input and modification. The original topics from April and May preceeded by the moniker 'FAQ' to identify them as a submissions was a realy good idea but no one does it.

 

3) There are several requests and much discussion as to the availability of 'documentation', not 'knowledge base', in particular, downloadable information. Also, input in the discussion with Melinda revolved around establishing a definable structure to the knowledge base which certainly appeared to take on the tree structure of an outline or table of contents. Further, the word 'OSC Docs' is used as the starting point for the OSC knowledge base. This creates an expectation of documentation among the community members. In short, the knowledge base input is not being offered on the forum and so isn't making it onto the Wiki.

 

4) A forum, by it's very nature, promotes the asking of questions; a Wiki or knowledge base, the input of answers. At least three members mentioned that they were not allowed to participate in the Wiki. By allowing community members to participate in Wiki, the knowledge base will grow, even if it does not have the polished, edited appearance of the current Wiki effot - and could be the spring board for the documentation. I also saw reference to how easy it is to make a pdf file of the Wiki Effort. Would that not be easy to do every time the Wiki Effort is updated and make it available as a download on the OSC downloads page? A simple save in pdf format into the appropriate directoy should do it.

 

5) Such an open Wiki as I have suggested would probably serve to eliminate the posting of redundant questions and posts to the effect of "Yea, me too!" thus reducing the research time of knowledge seekers and freeing up the forum to deal with the newer topics and issues which need to be addressed. I mean, how many times do members have to read a post such as "Hey, I installed but my images are broken!", "How do I Easy Populate?", or "How do I get SSL working?" I'm not at that point in my own OSC developement, but am worried that I won't be able to find the right post or that my list of tracked topics will be almost as long as searching through the plethera of posts and responses which offer little or nothing of value to get to those that do. I saw a recent post by Jan Wildeboer which answered a question he answered for me last March, and it was almost verbatim. How many times has he answered it and wouldn't that answer better serve in the Wiki or knowledge base if he were allowed to enter it?

 

6) An open Wiki would not be hard to do. All it would cost is a little more disk space.

 

My intention here is not to be critical of OSC efforts but to effectively debate and promote something I firmly believe will help to advance OSCommerce by making it easier to use for the newer members and free up the valuable time and resources of those community and team members who work so hard to help those new people in the process of helping to realize OSCommerce.

 

If this is something the community really wants, it might be worth considering. How about it folks? Any input or even just a 'yea or nay' post would help

 

Charles

[inetchoices]

Amen, Charles. Amen!

[Guest]

Somewhere or another, there is a thread about posting in this forum to submit documentation.

 

Hth,

Matt

[charles]

That just illustrates my point. You knew the thread was there because you responded to it and suggested it be made sticky. It was not. Consequently, the thread regarding Wiki input proceedure was lost in the oblivion of last July, not up front where it can be observed. Knowledge based posts are not being made on this forum partly because no one is 'encouraged' to do so by the constant reminder or plea to do so.

 

Another reason for my suggestion of an open Wiki is that, with the table structure already in place, people would know what has been addrressed and what has not. On a forum board, that might not necessarily be the case because, face it, often people offer new input without reading the existing input. It is better to keep it all in one place.

 

Charles

[Guest]

Charles,

 

Is it okay if I copy your post elsewhere? You have mentioned some things that are ignored in many places. I may have some people work on a module for Xaraya that does some of the things you mention and would like to share your post with them.

 

Martin Beversdorf

[peterr]

Charles,

 

I liked your ideas about this, and as an osC newbie, I have already found that about 80% of the problems I encountered were not in the Wiki, nor where they in the searches within the forum/s.

 

I have only made minor changes, real basic stuff, but have already seen, many posts by 'newbies', asking exactly the same questions that others have asked before and that are _not_ in the Wiki. In an effort to _put_ some material in the Wiki that new people need, I submitted my "findings", and "how to do it", but I doubt it will ever get considered. That doesn't really concern me, but surely if more of the commonly asked questions were submitted to a "wiki panel' (or whatever you want to call it), for review, then all these questions that are asked over and over again (I'm mostly talking about the 'Install/Config" forum) could be 'redirected' to the Wiki.

 

I can understand that the people who have so far put the Wiki together have done so in their own time, and I must say, it is good. But if resources are low to further enhance the Wiki, then surely more of a 'team effort' contribution to the Wiki, as Charles mentioned, is a jolly good idea. :D

 

When I see a (obviously new) person asking a question that is exactly what I have had to 'solve' myself, it is much more effort for me to explain it all again, rather than simply provide a link to the Wiki docs. Doing it this way would also give people a faster turnaround in searching, because rather than read through the myriad of search results, possibly the results could be sorted, so that any Wiki docs on the requested search strings would appear up the top.

 

Mostly lurking in the "Install/Configure" forum, because I'm a newbie, I can really sense a new persons frustration at not being able to find the answers to very easy questions/problems. The community effort and spirit is very good in the forums, however providing more Wiki docs will mean the problems are solved sooner, and those trying to help others learn osC, can possibly put more of their time into (again) enhancing the Wiki documentation.

 

Peter

[Dragonmom]

And, As the wiki grows, it's beginning to be time to place a big, fat, highly visible LINK to it at the top of each forum.

"MANY OF YOUR QUESTIONS MAY BE ANSWERED HERE"

The forum database would heave a sigh of relief!

[peterr]

Yes Shawn, good point. :)

 

Also, a major improvement to the Wiki would be to place the search function at the TOP of the page, not where it is at present, right down the bottom.

 

I only found it (the search function) by accident, and have only ever seen search functions at the top of forms.

 

Peter

[AlanR]

And, As the wiki grows, it's beginning to be time to place a big, fat, highly visible LINK to it at the top of each forum.

 

The forum database would heave a sigh of relief!

It would also be a good idea to re-name the Wiki link at the top to:

 

Frequently Asked Questions - Wiki Effort *or* FAQ - Wiki Effort

[spayce_girl]

Is there a way to download the entire document into one file, like pdf?

[peterr]

Hi,

 

Is there a way to download the entire document into one file, like pdf?

 

If there was no problem with copyright, or other 'legal' issues, you could enquire about downloading the entire Wiki, and then (somehow) getting that into a PDF ??

 

Please see the copyright on the Wiki here - http://wiki.oscommerce.com/CopyrightNotice

 

Peter