Gnucash wiki

[Buddha Buck]

I just went and looked at the Wiki, to get an idea of what the task is.

I'm all for Wikis containing everything, as long as it is clearly
identified and organized. Currently, I agree that the Wiki doesn't meet
that standard. Even the front page is a "mixed bag" of content, and
could/should be organized better. As you point out, figuring out the
necessary organization is difficult.

I think that for starters the creation of a few templates that can be
dropped onto pages to help classify content and make it visible would help.
For instance, create a Template:Historical template which (a) adds the
article to the "Historical" category, and (b) displays a box at the top of
the page saying that the content of the page applies to a past version of
GnuCash and is not current documentation. Then Wiki editors can look at a
page (on, say, using lots for managing stock transactions) and drop in the
template so that future readers who stumble upon it can clearly see it's
probably not what they are looking for.

Based on the things you've noticed, I can suggest a few templates to make:

   - Template:Historical
   - Template:Version|vernum|endvernum  (for marking that a page is useful
   for GnuCash between versions vernum and endvernum, both optional).
   - Template:InDevelopment (for marking pages that refer to features that
   are in development, but haven't been released)
   - Template:Os|ostype (for marking pages with OS-specific information
   - Template:MarkedForDeletion

I can also see categories related to

   - Category:HowTo
   - Category:Development
   - Category:Documentation
   - Category:Announcement
   - Category:Events
   - Category:CanSomeoneElseLookAtThisPlease

221 content pages doesn't sound like a lot. I'd be willing to do some of
the work to set up the templates and categories (once we nail down what we
want) and start working through the pages and tagging them with categories
and templates.


On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 1:25 PM Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be>
wrote:

> 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
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