ArchWiki: Issues

iphitus · 2006-11-10 23:29:26

Current issues with mediawiki:

Handling of translations
Foxbunny is unhappy with the current method employed by mediawiki to handle translations.

Possible solutions

'namespaces': http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=26798

Appearance
There is general dislike of the current appearance of the wiki.

iphitus: This is mostly caused because the formatting of the wiki is completely screwed up by the common arch header, which has poorly written CSS. The CSS in the header declares things globally, whereas it should only specify things to specific classes/ids within itself. Similar to a global variable causing havoc in a poorly written app.

There is discussion here: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=26773

Possible Solutions

Adopt Pierre's Mediawiki layout, however to make any changes to the theme, we need access to the server.
http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/5815

Categories
The current set of categories have proved inadequate and messy.

Possible solutions

To rectify this, foxbunny has done an absolutely wonderful job of trying to clean up the categories and pages within, and this could be considered fixed soon.

Search - solved?
Dusty: The search mechanism sucks, and is apparently case dependent. Search results are often irrelevant and don't include results that would be helpful. Possible options are to fix the search engine or to use a google search engine. Wikipedia search works fine, so this issue is presumably not inherent to MediaWiki.

Possible solutions

Use google. I've seen sites which have customised google output with CSS, and i'm pretty sure this is something anyone can do. Although we'd have to provide the mediawiki as well -- not everyone likes google. http://www.google.com/services/siteflavored.html

Mediawiki's search seems to only be titles. Has it got a decent case insensitive (indexed?) full text search that we can use?

According to Pierre, Mediawiki DOES have case insensitive full text search, this needs to be investigated, and enabled if needed -- may need admin access to enable.
It seems it's already enabled: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Spe … text=Suche

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fulltext_search_engines

mediawiki out of date
Needs server access. Will contact Judd.

Ability to mass move/rename/edit pages.
Currently mediawiki's abilitys are limited, requiring manual moves of each page. In terms of maintaining the wiki, this would help a great deal.

Foxbunny would like:
* Enables moving pages from one category to one or more categories.
* Can do selective moves of multiple pages (like I pick one page, then a few others, but not all).
* Possibly keep track of changes so that it can undo at least the last move.http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Special:Search?search=pacman&fulltext=Suche
* If no web interface can be made available (and/or the tool requires administrative privileges) it must accept CMV files (or any sort of plain text file) that sysops and other maintainers can create by hand.

Possible solutions

Finding a tool/addon to make this simpler: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:MediaWiki_tools

Find an extension: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions

Ability to list categories and pages in a tree form
Would make the maintenance and cleanup much easier.

Possible solutions

Find an extension: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions
A quick find on that page found about 3 or 4 trees for the wiki.

The official MediaWiki category tree extension: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CategoryTree_extension

Duesentrieb category tree extension: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Due … tegoryTree

Feature Requests
HTML2PDF: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/HTML2FPDF_and_Mediawiki

Should these issues prove insurmountable, then a move to another wiki may be *evaluated* depending on the severity of the remaining issues.
If there's any issues I've missed, which I am sure I have, please post and I'll add them.

James

tardo · 2006-11-11 02:11:09

This probably falls under the category of "need server access" but the wiki software needs updating.

foxbunny · 2006-11-11 09:57:54

iphitus wrote:

Current issues with mediawiki:

Very nice overview. Thanks. I hope this gets done soon enough...

Also, I would like to add this:

Ability to mass move/rename/edit pages.

This is the most wanted feature of DokuWiki for me right now. DokuWiki allows admins with server access to do just about anything on page files using sed, cp, mv and similar tools.

Maybe some kind of a plugin would do? Anything that would help us get this job done fast, and properly.

The tool/plugin/configuration would have to achieve this:

* Enables moving pages from one category to one or more categories.
* Can do selective moves of multiple pages (like I pick one page, then a few others, but not all).
* Possibly keep track of changes so that it can undo at least the last move.
* If no web interface can be made available (and/or the tool requires administrative privileges) it must accept CMV files (or any sort of plain text file) that sysops and other maintainers can create by hand.

File structure can be this simple:

ORIGINALPAGENAME, NEWCATEGORY1, NEWCATEGORY2, ... NEWCATEGORYx

The tool/plugin/configuration would then hund down any [[Cateogy:*]] string within ORIGINALPAGENAME, remove them, then add [[Category:NEWCATEGORY1]], [[Category:NEWCATEGORY2]] , etc. to the beginning of the ORIGINALPAGENAME page. It has to be Unicode, and has to allow spaces and other characters that are usually permitted for Wiki pages.

Also we need this:

Ability to list categories and pages in a tree form

I especially need this to be able to coordinate the move. Also, this could be useful if the above mentioned tool would ever become available.

Pierre · 2006-11-11 10:23:13

MediaWiki supports fulltext and caseindependent search.

iphitus · 2006-11-11 10:34:00

Redactions added. maybe this page ought to be moved to the wiki?

James

Pierre · 2006-11-11 10:40:10

I think fulltextsearch is currently enabled. See: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Spe … text=Suche

foxbunny · 2006-11-11 11:50:36

iphitus wrote:

Redactions added. maybe this page ought to be moved to the wiki?
James

No, let it stay here. ArchWiki is mostly visited by editors, maintainers, and readers. So this needs to stay here so that developers who don't read the wiki can also take a look. Maybe announce it somewhere on the forum's main page?

dtw · 2006-11-11 12:12:37

Dusty can move it to Announcements, which will make it appear in the summary at the top of the forums.

foxbunny · 2006-11-11 13:36:12

The official MediaWiki category tree extension:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CategoryTree_extension

Duesentrieb category tree extension:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Due … tegoryTree

For devs that want a shot at improving the search engine:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fulltext_search_engines

Could someone please tell me what this is about?:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SubPageList2

This could be a nice feature for those that want to print out and/or save ArchWiki pages for future off-line reference (I would love to see this on ArchWiki sometime after we finish dealing with priority stuff):
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/HTML2FPDF_and_Mediawiki

As for the wiki appearance, Romashka and myself will be working on it soon. I have already worked on some drafts and decided I wouldn't like to make ArchWiki look like Pierre's site (which is nice, though). I will post the results when they are complete.

Romashka · 2006-11-11 13:49:46

foxbunny wrote:

This looks promissing:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multilanguage
If this works as advertized, it would be THE solution to our multilingual problem.

If I understand right, it will lead to huge pages with 5-10 languages on them. :?

foxbunny · 2006-11-11 16:03:24

Romashka wrote:

If I understand right, it will lead to huge pages with 5-10 languages on them. :?

Yeah... kind of.... :oops: I thought about it, too. It would also be bad if multilingual titles are not included in search by title kind of searches... Yeah. You're right. Forget that link.

Arch Linux

#1 2006-11-10 23:29:26

ArchWiki: Issues

#2 2006-11-11 02:11:09

Re: ArchWiki: Issues

#3 2006-11-11 09:57:54

Re: ArchWiki: Issues

#4 2006-11-11 10:23:13

Re: ArchWiki: Issues

#5 2006-11-11 10:34:00

Re: ArchWiki: Issues

#6 2006-11-11 10:40:10

Re: ArchWiki: Issues

#7 2006-11-11 11:50:36

Re: ArchWiki: Issues

#8 2006-11-11 12:12:37

Re: ArchWiki: Issues

#9 2006-11-11 13:36:12

Re: ArchWiki: Issues

#10 2006-11-11 13:49:46

Re: ArchWiki: Issues

#11 2006-11-11 16:03:24

Re: ArchWiki: Issues

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