Re: [Xen-devel] Proposals/changes for a new Wiki Front-Page - need input/mods/creative proposals

[George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 10:24 AM, Lars Kurth <lars.kurth.xen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Rolu,
>
> thanks for the feedback.
>
>
>> xen" and "help with xcp" it would be nice if there were a few lines at
>> the top of the page explaining which is which, so (new) people can
>> have a better idea of where to look.
>
>
> So you mean a link to Xen and XCP from the headline, or a tagline describing
> what Xen/XCP is? Two lines are probably OK; more would probably break up the
> navigation too much.
>
>>
>> The descriptions from
>> http://xen.org/products/ and a link to
>> http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_/_XCP_/_XCP_on_Linux_Overview would work.
>> The latter is already linked in the "getting started with xen" column
>> but would be better off at the top since it gives a feature table of
>> both.
>
> I am wondering whether Xen Features / XCP Features in one of the boxes would
> not be better.
>
>>
>> As someone who started with Xen not long ago, I much prefer dedicated
>> link pages over Category: pages. The latter just give a big unsorted
>> (alphabetical doesn't count, needs to be sorted by subtopic to be a
>> useful sort) list of pages of widely varying scope and usefulness.
>> It's better than nothing, sure, but a page that sorts them by topic or
>> purpose or something (much like this proposed front page really) is a
>> lot better.
>
> How about a compromise? Category pages have two parts:
> 1) A fixed part that can be used for any content, such as lists of important
> articles by topic or other ciriteria
>     An example of this is http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Category:Host_Install
> (and some of the pages linked from it)
> 2) The auto-generated index
>
> I know that some people are don't like category pages. However, until
> somebody steps up and provides an alternative, which to do well requires
> a) Classifying articles
> b) Grouping them by topic or purpose
> c) Encoding that grouping in some manual index
> d) Keeping these up-to-date
>
> ... the category pages are all we have and are a lot better than what we had
> in the old wiki. And they are self-maintaining.

Sorry to throw in a criticism without a constructive solution, but I
just want to register one opinion: To me clicking on a link and seeing
a "Category" page says very strongly, "I couldn't be bothered to
actually do any work here; I'll leave you to do all the work to figure
out what page you need."  When I encounter a Category page on my walk
through the Xen wiki, I don't even look, but immediately turn to
Google.  I think a page which is has some kind of logical flow to it
but perhaps a little out-dated is much better than a page which just
tosses up a bunch of titles in no order and lets you figure it out.

I can certainly see that there were "liveness" problems with summary
pages; but I don't think that the Categories pages, as we have now,
really help that much.

> The fact that we are having this discussion is actually good. I am open to
> suggestions and maybe we just need a small number of manually maintained
> indexes (or categories with maintained content at the top). Maybe to make
> this really work and get better navigability we need some degree of
> ownership in the wiki: i.e. community members owning content, categories,
> etc. and being responsible for classifying, grouping and making it more
> accessible.

I think in an ideal world, we'd have people who were "maintainers" of
the wiki just like there are maintainers of different subsections of
the codebase.  Until that time, could we maybe draw up a set of
"tests" to run on the docs, which can be assigned to people on DocDay?
 One simple thing could be, "Make sure X page is up-to-date" (which
may include, "Look at the Category: page and make sure everything
there is listed somewhere on the manually-generated page"); another
could be a scenario, "Pretend you're a [foo] and you want to know
[bar].  Start at the top level page and make sure you can find all the
information you need."  If each "test" was something any motivated
developer/community member could do, and only took 5-10 minutes, it
should be pretty sustainable.  What do you think?

One thing that might make the Category: page more useful is if we
could include "index tags" on articles, and then sort the Category:
pages by those tags instead of by title.  But I'm not sure how easy
that is to do with the current wiki.

 -George

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