On Thursday I brought up, on the maintainers@ mailing list, the question that had been dicussed a few months ago and discussed on the cooker list from about April-June, regarding the restructing of the Mandriva Linux Development Community wiki with the possibility of moving if from that hideous POS TWiki to something a whole lot more extensible and faster, MediaWiki.
What came of the first discussion (which spanned about three months) was this demo site which, while looking pretty, has a whole bunch of (in my mind) flaws to it… primarily that it looks too much like the OpenSUSE wiki (it’s really really scary how similar they look), and it’s also really difficult to read. Yes, style can be changed quite easily, but I think the focus of this demo site was solely on style.
The current state of the wiki is awful… it’s really difficult to find anything and TWiki is slow. MediaWiki is much nicer and much faster and it looks a whole lot better. So, to that end, I spent pretty much all day (besides heading outside to mow down some flowers to prepare for winter) setting up a new MediaWiki install that can be used instead of TWiki. Unlike the previous demo, my goal was not to make it look nice (although I don’t think it looks bad, and I think it looks better than the current TWiki), but I wanted to make it a logical “structure” so that it would make sense and things are laid out logically. The problem with the current TWiki is that there are no real rules to it, and no hierarchy. It, honestly, looks like the desk in my office. And, like my desk, makes it damn near impossible to find anything without a lot of effort and cussing.
Obviously it’s far from complete. The idea I have in mind is to migrate not only the developer wiki but the Mandriva Community wiki (which I also host and instigated years ago and which also went through a TWiki to MediaWiki migration) into one big “Mandriva wiki”. When I look at other distributions and their wikis, most of them look pretty good and are well laid-out. Ours is pure anarchy. And I think it reflects poorly on us. Not only that, but why on earth should we have multiple wikis (Community wiki, Developers wiki, Club wiki) when one would suffice and everyone could pool the information and talent to work on a single project? A “one-stop resource” for all things Mandriva, if you will. I suppose, as a result, that it should probably not be hosted on the “qa” machine (with Bugzilla) but on it’s own machine or, at the very least, be named “wiki.mandriva.com” instead of qa.mandriva.com/wiki/.
Ok, you’ve been in suspence long enough. You can check out what I’ve done at mdv.vmlinuz.ca. Please sign up for an account and help convert data from TWiki over to it. I’ve started, but it’s slow going… if I could devote an entire week to this, I could probably do it all on my own (I did the community wiki in 3 days). I figure if we have something in place that’s pretty close or at least on it’s way to being done, and don’t squabble over CSS and layout issues, then we have a real shot at replacing that awful TWiki.
In the end, I figure it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission, so I went ahead and started it (which seems to be something of a habit with me and web resources for Mandriva). Hopefully it’ll pan out (most of the other initiatives I’ve over the years have, so I don’t expect this one to be much different).
10 Comments
Quote:
“When I look at other distributions and their wikis, most of them look pretty good and are well laid-out. Ours is pure anarchy. And I think it reflects poorly on us.”
Yet having one of their own employees announce to the world that he doesn’t and wouldn’t use the product he helps develop _does not_ reflect poorly on Mandriva some how? LOL!
If Mandriva ever closed its doors, I’m sure it wouldn’t be because of a poorly designed Wiki page. More likely it would be from internal sabotage.
My personal preference to desktop use has nothing to do with anything. We’re not discussing my personal desktop preference whatsoever (and, in fact, I find that using Ubuntu, SUSE, or Fedora is just as much of a “crappy” experience… for instance, the ATI issues I was having on Mandriva I also got with SUSE when I installed SUSE on the same machine).
I was discussing the availability of good documentation and information.
I’m also not saying that a poor wiki is going to make Mandriva “close it’s doors”. I’m not sure where you got that idea from.
And, FWIW, I love Mandriva. Out of all desktop Linux distros out there, it is the best, bar none. I don’t just say that a) because I’m an employee and b) to cover my ass… =) It’s absolutely true. I’ve tried many Linux distros over the last few years, and Mandriva still comes out on top.
However, my issue is that we’re not very well organized in terms of documentation and that is something I’m trying to correct (I can’t “fix” the desktop Linux thing… I’m not a developer so I leave that to brighter people than me… and since the “desktop Linux thing” is not just Mandriva but *all* Linux distros, it’s not something that Mandriva in and of itself can simply “fix”).
I apologize if I mis-took your posting of Sept. 25th. and it’s purpose. I can appreciate that you wish to make Mandriva a better OS and the Wiki could use some major improvements.
But I’m concerned that your previous post (Sept 25th) has the potential of doing more damage than good. Building a better Wiki is a great objective, but it will do little to Mandriva’s “public image” if even its employees don’t value their own product. As you said yourself, it reflects poorly on us (I consider myself as one of the “us” as I support the Mandriva community and its efforts, too)… at least in the short-term.
Even though you were commenting on the Linux desktop in general, because Mandriva was the distro. in the spotlight, it seems as though the community mis-understood (as I have) that it was directed at Mandriva itself.
There are things about the Linux desktop that can certainly improve. I guess I just would have handled it differently (might not be better, just different).
Anyway, once again, my apologies for mis-understanding your intentions and sorry for “busting your chops”.
Best of luck with the new Wiki and I hope future work by the dev. team can make Linux a pleasant desktop environment for you (there’s always hope).
No problem. I see that, even if I wouldn’t have mentioned any particular version of Linux in my 09/25 post, people would have inferred Mandriva anyways, simply by virtue of who I am and who I work for. To that end, I’m actually quite irritated by this whole thing, especially how distrowatch spun it.
If you’ll note, until distrowatch made a big deal of it, the comments were largely about ATI and commercial drivers. Which is a reasonable conversation to have. In no way was I implying Mandriva “sucked” or Linux “sucked”.
People, however, make up their own minds and probably started seeing red quite early on and maybe didn’t even bother to read the whole entry before jumping all over it.
If nothing else, the response made me figure out the 3d desktop stuff… which is now noted in a new post today. So that’s good. The bad thing is how people are completely blowing this out of proportion to what it was meant for.
I mean, for crying out loud, if you can’t vent on your own blog without people tearing your throat apart, where can you vent?
And, honestly, for the most part… Linux on the desktop is fine (for me). I can’t say that my dad will be using it on the desktop anytime soon, but it works well enough for me (it has to, it’s part of the job). It serves it’s function… I don’t need the eye candy, but I want to be able to try it out just as easily as the next guy. And the less geeky than me would probably appreciate the eye candy more than me (hell, I use OS X and live in the terminal more often than not!).
Vent away, Man.
At least you know now that people somewhere are reading your blog.
Hi,
Links skin MediaWiki MDV: http://thelinux.free.fr/pub/Distributions_Linux/Mandrivalinux/mdv1.0.tar.gz
Very nice, thanks. I’ll take a look at it and possibly incorporate some of the elements of the site. My big thing was the RSS feed bit… couldn’t figure out what you had done there (I assumed an extension), so I left it but that was the big thing I was looking at.
As I said in my post to cooker, the look-n-feel can come later… it’s the structure and content I’m more concerned with.
I feel your pain… our TWiki (which I’ve been against using from square one) was hacked with links to online drug store pages, and the spammer has been using our domain to send spam as a result.
I was wondering if you know of any relatively easy methods for converting the TWiki stuff to, say, MediWiki? I realize it would probably create a mess, but it might also be better that starting from scratch… and I hope I could also get the users’ help to clean up the pages.
Thanks, and best wishes for yoru migration!
~John
Me and a fellow from Mandriva (Thierry) are working on a conversion script. It won’t be 100%, but it should take most of the dirty work out of it.
Cool! Let me know if you figure it out… good luck!