Mailing List Archive

On Nov 20, 2003, at 08:18, Agon S. Buchholz wrote:
> I'd like to know who is *currently* working on the documentation for
> MediaWiki, and where the intended central place for this is, if
> there's na. If there's need, I'd like to volunteer to help out, if I
> can.

I think maveric149's been working on the end-user docs in dribs and
drabs, but the site-runner documentation isn't being very actively
worked on at the moment; existing docs are sort of scattered in several
places half-finished. It'd be great if you could help out!

If you'd like to start consolidating things under [[MediaWiki
Administrator's Guide]] or such on meta, that'd be a great place to
start.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Brion Vibber wrote:

> I think maveric149's been working on the end-user docs in dribs and
> drabs, but the site-runner documentation isn't being very actively
> worked on at the moment; existing docs are sort of scattered in
> several places half-finished. It'd be great if you could help out!
>
> If you'd like to start consolidating things under [[MediaWiki
> Administrator's Guide]] or such on meta, that'd be a great place to
> start.

I started my brainstorming and put some stuff on
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation; there it doesn't disturb
the existing documentation and seems quite logical to me. However, all
of this is just a proposal, of course.

The new documentation will consists of six parts:

PART 1: Introduction - General Information and Architecture.
PART 2: Administrator's Guide - Installation, Configuration,
Administration, Care & Feeding.
PART 3: User's Guide - Usage of the MediaWiki Software.
PART 4: Developer's Guide - Development, Bug Tracking, Roadmap, Known
Issues, (Feature Requests).
APPENDIX: Additional Information.
FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions.

This is more or less brainstorming and content collection at the moment;
it will take a few more days until I have a first draft. At the moment,
it's just six new pages (e.g.
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation:_Introduction), but I'll
restructure it somehow further on the
"http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation:" stub (e.g.
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation:Installation,
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation:Administration etc.), if
nobody opposes.

Part 1 is quite easy to complete, most of it exists and needs just some
rewriting; the features list is from Sourceforge, I think, it's not
up-to-date; e.g. there are still subpages mentioned.

Part 2 ("Administrator's Guide") needs some thought and restructuring,
and factual checking, this will take some time and help by an
experienced MediWiki admin.

The skeleton of Part 3 already exists in Meta and Wikipedia, so there's
no problem.

With Part 4, I definitely will need some help. My idea was, at least to
get a technical introduction to the architechture of the scripts (whcih
file does what, which depends on what, etc.), so a new developer gets a
kickstart; or maybe this should just contain some pointers how to access
the CVS?

And at the very end someone with better English skills should correct my
Denglish ;)

However, comments and any help is mostly appreciated, as always.

Greetings, -asb