Please don’t presume I am being too presumptuous in my suggestions, but I really would like to see a closer tie between the information in these forums, and that in the wiki. As it stands, the wiki is something of a sitting duck. I put a lot of work into it in the past, but it seems it’s not being used as well as I might hope.
This was one of the reasons why I started to write the cookbook. so, what I am proposing, for those of you whom are interested, is an IRC dicussion to determine what we can do to and for the FvwmWiki. I’ve gone ahead and created the #fvwmwiki IRC channel hosted on irc.freenode.net
Given timezone differences, etc – is there any time that people would like to perhaps instigate this? And indeed, a specific day?
ThomasAdam,
I would love to help out with the wiki. I agree with you that there is a lot of information on this forum that can be migrated, and I also have some potential ideas for the wiki.
As what a time is concerned, I’m in the EST TimeZone, which is at -5. I’m usually on IRC between 8am and 5pm EST.
-Dizz
I think the most important thing that needs to happen is lowering the barrier to adding to the wiki as I, and no doubt many other, find it quite difficult to decide what belongs where and how to get it there in the first place (the wiki helppages could be a lot better imho, at least last I tried to add anything)
Really? I wasn’t aware that people saw the wiki as a barrier. :/
I can’t say that the pages I’ve written to aide this are any good, either, since I’d just be re-writing the help pages that MoinMoin ships with. However, perhaps the following helps address that?
Pffft. The particular wiki doesn’t matter – it’s not called “www.mediawikifvwmwiki.org”, and I am certainly not about to change it. It’s the content that matters, not the engine at use.
I wouldn’t have said “official” – how can it be? It’s a wiki, that could be edited by any number of people that only use FVWM. I want the wiki to be a collection of useful information by way of explanation – look atthe FrontPage and at the ToDo page for my ideas on that.
As I shall most likely add to the wiki later, I don’t want the wiki to end up as a place to ask questions about FVWM. That’s why the forums and mailing-lists exist. That said, I might (assuming its usage increases) add a page for people to ask questions about wiki content – or I might just direct them to the Forums or mailing-list. I am undecided yet.
Sorry for bringing up this old topic again, but I actually think it does matter. To me and many other people I know, Media Wiki simply allows for easier and nicer editing and formatting.
If you don’t believe me, consider the recent changes on the Gentoo wiki (http://gentoo-wiki.com) vs the Debian wiki (http://wiki.debian.org). There is much higher activity on the gentoo wiki, and from the size of the userbase, I would expect the Debian wiki to be at least as active.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think shiny looks matter in the wiki world, and mediawiki simply looks very nice.
My point was that I think that the wiki engine actually matters, because of looks, ease of use etc. I like MediaWiki best and I think most other poeple do as well. For one thing, uploading images is very easy compared to some other wiki engines.
I don’t mean to offend anyone by suggesting this change. I just personally think it would mean higher activity on the Wiki.
Well, it’s still only a means to an end. The converse of what you say also holds true though in that if we did switch over to mediawiki, there’ll always be people who’d want something else.
At the end of the day, it’s just an engine – the markup used does differ from mediawiki in most aspects, but then that’s intentional – they’re different. I don’t particularly wish to change engines on the off-chance we might get more people editing the wiki.
So far, it just hasn’t happened. I’ve [1] had help from a number of people, but its use and growth is still very short – people just don’t see interested in it at present. I’m doing all I can to update it as and when, but it’s not something I can do on my own – maybe if I worked on it fulltime, but I don’t.
– Thomas Adam
[1] I use “I’ve” but of course, I am not personalising this.
Make a clearly visible link from the forum to the wiki, for example using a stick post or even better by just adding a link to the top menu of this page.
I know it sounds a little silly but personally I, for some reason that’s not very clear to me, always forget that there is a wiki. I first search the forum, then google and if I’m lucky the wiki pops up in my head.
Its not just you. I actually don’t think I have ever used the wiki. If it was advertised better (with a link here or there) I would probably use it. But when it comes to figuring out a solution to a problem I think fvwm forums + google + an e-friend that uses it + gentoo forums…but never do I think “wiki”.
That’s a shame, because I’ve been directing people to it for some time now in answering specific issues. Granted it’s not that full yet, but I’m working on it.
And when I say I’m I actually mean so far it has pretty much been me whom has: reorganise{d,ing} the wiki such that Catgeories are involved, has added a boot-load of content, has proof-read and disambiguated FVWM 2.4.X to FVWM 2.5.X configuration options [1], has made several attempts at getting other people to help. But to no avail.
Maybe it’s not such a good idea after all. All I know is that it needs improving and so far I’m the only that seems interested to add content to it. So if that’s how it will continue, then it’s going to be slow, but it will get there in the end.
I am getting a little tired of it all, I must admit. I don’t mean to whinge, but I do seemingly put in a lot of effort – both here and IRC especially. Sometimes I wonder if the benefits of doing so are worth it at times…
– Thomas Adam
[1] Yes, some people still use FVWM 2.4.X – and as it’s still supported by the FVWM team, it deserves as much attention as the unstable version.
Hey! You’ve had help!
Admittedly, not that much. Maybe it’s because committing to wiki means one needs to have considerable amount of knowledge of Fvwm.
Wiped? No. Rearranged, yes. I haven’t gotten around to sorting all the pages. Indeed, at the moment for an existing URL that causes a 404, the error page does list the likely page you were trying to find.
Nothing has been deleted. I’ll repeat that. Nothing has been deleted. What page was it you were looking for? Indeed, you can most likely find it via the Search feature of the wiki.
One of the reasons why I am rearranging where pages live is because the way the pages were initially (my own fault entirely) it wasn’t scaling properly, hence I thought it best to rearrange things whilst I am still able to.
