[maemo-developers] maemo wiki survey

[From: Greg Morgan]

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Quim Gil wrote:
> Dear maemo contributors, can you please answer these questions?
> 
> - What do you think about the current wiki tool at
> http://maemo.org/community/wiki (leaving content aside) ?

It feels like the new wiki/cms engine is missing some key things.  It's
not like it is a vim/emacs war, but things are missing that make this
not a wiki in the full since of the Hawaiian word.

> 
> - Are you using it? Did you use the previous one?
I have only had time to make two small changes to the new system.  I
make extensive page edits to the original MoinMoin wiki.  I was
attempting to categorize the original wiki's content before job and
family kept me busy for the last seven to eight months.

> 
> - Are you thinking of using the community wiki?
> 
In my case, I can say that this is a more complex question. I wanted to
contribute to a centralized wiki for the 770.  Even though this popular
wiki existed and it uses my favorite wiki engine
http://www.internettablettalk.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page , I
chose the Maemo wiki because I didn't want to dilute the effort that was
already in place.  It feels like the Maemo wiki/cms engine change was a
step back.  It is hard to build up a community of content editors for a
project.  Content system changes for a project can be a set back.  My
contributions to the Maemo wiki have diminised ( and all other wikis
that I contribute too) because of work and family constraints.

The larger question for me is, "Do I still buy a new 800?"  Without new
hardware, then there may be less reason for me to contribute.  It is
difficult to find my older contributions and edit them for my existing
770 platform.  In addition, I am not interested in the Apple iPhone, but
the openmoko http://www.openmoko.org/ makes the 800 a more difficult
choice because the WAF, Wife approval Factor, would not be favorable for
two $350+ US purchases.  What makes the neo1973 give the 800 a run for
the money is that the August Linux Journal says that Sun will put the
JavaFX on the platform. I confirmed that here
http://blogs.sun.com/brewin/entry/fic_and_openmoko_thank_you and here
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/when_not_where .  Don't worry I am a
Sun customer.  The Gnome desktop of Solaris 10 is what I was expecting
for Solaris 9.  Let's see what the hype brings because Sun has not been
very focused for the last several years in my experience.  Chuckle, they
might even run an OpenSolaris kernel on the neo1973.  However, with what
I am seeing, it certainly is a very interesting place that Nokia finds
themselves in right now.  For a number of reasons provided through out
this email, my Maemo content production has been greatly frozen.
Moreover, it appears in my view of the world that, Nokia may have to
think about ways that they competitively keep Open Source developers
interested in the Maemo platform.

> - Mention good things / bad things of the current wiki (and what would
> you do).
> 
Pluses
It appears to be integrated with the Maemo garage account login.
The pages from the MoinMoin wiki were converted.

I don't have to use docbook to create the content. (I am not trying to
start a flame war here, but docbook just didn't work for me. The whole
edit, svn/cvs checkin, compile, publish thing was too cumbersome. In my
experience, wikis or cms systems allow for flexible changes and
redirection of a page in a new direction.  Note this is precisely what
drives people daffy about wikis.  It appears to me that some people that
don't like wikis miss the pre-planning and editorial control of the page
or site.)

The edit tags are not too different from MoinMoin but the tags do
present a stumbling block.  MoinMoin, MediaWiki, Twiki, appear to be the
big three user content systems for many Open Source projects.  The
content engine change does move in another direction.


Minuses:

It was not obvious that a Maemo garage account login was required right
away.

The converted MoinMoin wiki pages lost a great deal of their formatting.
Until I poked around in the floating tool's folder> orphaned pages, I
could not find all the MoinMoin content.  For example, I tried to make
https://maemo.org/community/wiki/flasher_tool_usage.html look like
http://maemo.org/community/community-projects/getting-started .  All the
original formatting has been lost.  I have really been busy with family
life.  How do I go about completing the getting-started page since it
bugs me that I left the page high and dry without the final revision
polish that I was struggling to say?

In the new engine, I tried to perform a preview of a page before saving
my changes, the floating tool's page> view menu lost my changes.  My
expectations are that I would have seen a preview and then saw my
spelling error.  So it cost me an edit page, lose page edit, edit page,
save page, view resulting saved page, edit page again for spelling error
that I created in the replacement edit, before finally saving the one
line addition.  That's expensive.

I looked at the revision log. It only shows where I made a change.  The
new system does not let me put in a "change log commit message".
Moreover, I don't see a way to perform a diff on the changed page.
Sometimes, that helps in the editing process. When I clicked on the
revision page number for the page I edited, I received "Notice: Array to
string conversion in
/usr/share/midgard/svn/midcom/midcom_2_8/midcom.core/midcom/helper/_styleloader.php(532)
: eval()'d code on line 30"  I'd think, the midgard folks should hide
this from the users so that evil people don't try to poke around with
your site based on the errors that are returned.

I miss the table of contents, TOC, feature that I could use in MoinMoin
or MediaWiki.  Mediawiki was especially good in that you could use the
TOC, for creating FAQ questions that pointed back to a content page.
(The section tags in MediaWiki also create automatic html anchors.)

This link should be put somewhere on the main page or an easy to get to
place https://maemo.org/community/wiki/orphans.html .  That appears to
be a good search page for some of the old content that still may be
useful. The idea is similar to what the openpbx project did with their
name change and site change to callweaver.org.  Please look at the
bottom of the page for the Old Resources section
http://callweaver.org/wiki/CallWeaver .

HTH,
Greg

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