Gnucash wiki

[Geert Janssens]

Hi,

A recent thread on a page in our wiki on lots raised the potential pitfall of 
having draft pages in our wiki as rightfully pointed out by David T.

I don't consider me a wiki maintainer really though I have contributed to some 
pages. This minor incident did get me thinking though. And I want to discuss 
the following question with a broader audience:

What do we want our wiki to be ?

A few statistics [0] for those interested in contributing to this discussion:
 
1. The wiki currently has 221 real content pages [1] of varying quality and 
usefulness.
2. In addition there are 310 additional related pages like redirects, talk 
pages,...
3. There are 12 admins, of which only a handful is still active as far as I 
know (and I didn't know *I* was one of them)
4. Looking at the content pages list, I find about 53 pages are ancient 
release announcements or readme files for obsolete gnucash versions.

In its current form it's a mixed bag of all kinds of content
- pages attempting to guide contributors in helping out in different forms
- pages attempting to help users with common or less common issues
- reports of past events
- some of these pages are generic, others are platform dependent,...
- however most pages don't specify their intent clearly so in several cases 
it's difficult to judge whether the page is for what you are looking for or 
not
- some pages have current information, others are for historical interest only
- ...

So what do we want to achieve with the wiki ?
Do we manage to achieve it ?

I believe we would be beneficial find an answer to these questions so we can 
more clearly guide the content creation in the wiki.

>From what I see the wiki is currently rather chaotic. I realize wikis usually 
are. However I think a wiki can be more. So a few first suggestions:

- At the very least the content that's there could do with some structuring 
(again a concept not native to wikis), for example by making better use of 
well thought out categories.

- Depending on the answer to my first question, I would also propose to drop 
certain pages, to start with the obsolete announcements and README pages.

>From there I'm very open to other suggestions to improve it. Please join in!

Regards,

Geert

[0] Gathered from here: http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Special:Statistics
[1] http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/index.php?
title=Special:AllPages&hideredirects=1