K5Wiki:Positioning the wiki

Planning the Wiki Evolution

This page is about avoiding a "how this wiki works, and where the heck is it" page. Right now, the wiki looks a bit like an untamed garden. It's worth looking at other opensource web sites and seeing how they use their wikis. Ease-of-use has a lot to do with "getting what you expect."

Format and content guidelines belong elsewhere.

Potential topics:

• What information is available in the wiki, and have we noted places where contributions would be welcome? Is any one person(?) responsible for keeping an eye on it?

• How is it organized -- is it easy to see the relationships between topics (which "child" page belongs to which "parent"? This should take the roadmap into account -- I don't think we've planned page stubs for contributors, and that could make wiki evolution more coherent.

• What level of information is available to who -- and when should we provide pointers to more specialized information? What, if anything, is confidential? How can an unprivileged person ask about that info?

• How do you find your way around? This is more of a design issue -- it probably belongs to the wiki-owners, not in the wiki itself.

This also relates to the re-design of the Kerberos Consortium web site, w/r/t ease of navigation and access to levels of information. It might be a good idea to link the wiki with the site page.

--Estone 21:27, 10 April 2008 (EDT)

As a side note, since this page is itself a discussion, I'm not really sure that its own talk page should have much content. That sounds perhaps too meta. --SamHartman 04:35, 11 April 2008 (EDT)

I think one of the main values in a wiki is its disorganization, or lack of central organization. You can construct multiple views to organize the information, and no one is forced on it. I do think we need some specific things to help.

• Better use of categories. The projects are moderately organized, but not much else is.
  1. Maturity. Is this a page you can trust, or is it a page that is actively evolving and that you should pay attention to only if you are interested in working on that page.
  2. Things needing attention--requests to consider deleting outdated content, requests to fact check sections or pages, etc.
  3. Organization. Categories for ongoing discussions, for developer guidelines, for informational resources that are reference material, for informational resources targeted mostly at new contributors.
• Templates for common types of pages that make sure they get into categories
• Make sure everything that is not very ephemeral makes its way into some category.
• Make sure that you can get from the main page to all the important categories
• On the about this wiki page, put more content describing the scope of the wiki.

Personally, I think it is a mistake to conflate this wiki with the consortium website redesign. This wiki is targeted at a small community--Developers--and the website is targeted at the large community of everyone who cares about Kerberos. Also, note that Steve wants to put some resources such as restricted white papers here for convenience; those resources probably should go in their own namespace and it is more important that they fit in with the consortium website than they fit in with this wiki. I've always argued that Steve is wrong on this issue and believe he should stick the whole website in a WCM with access control. --SamHartman 04:35, 11 April 2008 (EDT)