Hi all,
Further to the discussion in the faq thread, I've installed a copy of WordPress for the group to try out.
You can access it here:
Just had a quick play. I made a comment on there but thought it best to re-iterate here - presumably we don't want discussion/comment in two places in parallel??
Anyway... my point was that I?m not sure what the point of the Wordpress interface is - wouldn?t it just end up being a replacement or alternative version of uk.d-i-y? As far as the test categories on the right-hand side of the Wordpress screen go - well, don?t they equate to ?uk.d-i-y.general? ?uk.d-i-y.home? and ?uk.d-i-y.pushfit?; and the majority of uk.d-i-y punters regularly reject the concept of subdividing the ng? I think I feel a Wiki would be better; but I don't know how you solve the inevitable edit-wars issues.
David
Different people will have different takes on this; here's mine.
I don't see the suggested content management/publishing system as in any way a replacement for the newsgroup. In fact, I don't see it as a place to have discussions at all, any more than the main FAQ is.
I see it as a platform for publishing articles - these could be reviews, how-tos, collections of links to other useful resources etc.
Perhaps one reason it looks like some kind of discussion forum is because of the comments that one can post below an article. I thought this would be a useful feature, but we can simply turn it off. That would leave a simple article publishing system, where you log in, publish an article, and place it in the relevant category.
Again, my take - the categories are just a way of organising the articles - they aren't there for discussions.
This is the one thing that worries me most about a real wiki. My preference is that whatever publishing platform we use, an author should be the only person with editorial control over their articles. How do others feel about this?
Thanks for putting a tester up for us.
I've got 2 comments, and they may both seem trivial, but I do think they matter.
First I couldnt see how to read the articles, so nor will many new visitors, and this is an issue as it stands. Presentation not technology of course.
2nd everyone is familar with wiki and knows how to use one. This isnt so with the test site.NT
Ok, I will leave WordPress up there, and install a wiki. I'll try to get this done later today.
That's not really how wikis work :-) And the existing FAQs are very much a collaborative effort although a few people should be recognised for having done the bulk of the work pulling people's knowledge and suggestions together into a single document.
Would it be possible for anyone to be able to create or edit a wiki page, but for the page then to be held in a pending file (and locked from further editing) until one of a trusted band of account-holders approves the amendment to take the changes live?
If the wiki presents the account-holders with a list of pages to be approved with the before/after changes highlighted, it should be very quick to approved/reject the changes. Most FAQ pages are fairly static anyway. If we have 10 trusted people who log in once every two days to the wiki system, any edit shouldn't have to wait more than abg 4.8 hours to be made live, so the system would be fairly responsive.
I envisage the account-holders doing a minimum of editing and if a post needs rewriting because of grammar/spelling etc to reject it with a note asking the author to rewrite it.
IP address blocking to limit the number of creates/edits by non-registsred users in a 24/48/72-hour period to prevent automated spamming.
Rejected edits to be held on file with a record of the account-holder who rejected it, (and perhaps a brief note of the reason) for a reasonable period, in the interests of openness, and to allow the author (or anyone) of a rejected edit to rewrite it and resubmit it.
Owain
All of these suggestions are good, and all quite possible - but. Unless I can find an open source wiki that does all of the above, and anything else we want, the only choice is to write one. This turns a "I'll spend a couple of afternoons this week doing uk.d-i-y stuff" project into "I'll spend 2 weeks writing a wiki that does exactly what we want" project - which is sadly something I can't do at present.
As I type, I'm evaluating a bunch of different open source wikis for functionality. I'll pick the one that comes closest, and put it up for group evaluation.
As far as I'm concerned, this is just an experiment. If we don't find a solution that most people are happy with, it'll have to wait til I, or someone else, has the time to write one.
Pretty presumptious. I'd guess that nine out of ten people posting here haven't heeard of a wiki..
As far as I'm concerned uk.d-i-y is perfect as-is.
I think I should clarify a couple of things - a statement like that makes me think that perhaps some people have misunderstood what we're discussing.
Like you, I think uk.d-i-y is perfect as it is - as a discussion medium. It's a great format for having threaded discussions. However, it is an awful format for publishing permanent articles. I know Google (and Deja before it) does a great job of archiving the content, but it doesn't present you with a nice set of easily navigable, searchable articles - it presents you with lots of threaded discussions.
What we're talking about is setting up an article publishing system that allows multiple contributers to contribute content. This would not be a place for diy discussions, it would be a repository of knowledge, with the content maintained by the authors.
Ok, I've set up a wiki. After installing and trying out 8 different ones, I came to the conclusion that MediaWiki (which is used by Wikipedia) is way ahead of the rest. Here it is:
Play away, and post your thoughts.
I suspect many people (like me) have used them for reference but never written them from scratch though, or even edited them...
Great stuff!
But 'scuse the ignorance: how does it get started off? doesn't it need a shell or template or something rather than a blank canvas?
Is there a good general numpty guide somewhere?!
David
I knew someone would ask this, and have just written a couple of pointers on the main page. Please take a look, and let me know if more detail is required.
If you create your account and log in, then search for an article, it reports article not found and allows you to create it.
I've done one for wiring colours, lifted from wikipedia.
But yes, it does, otherwise all the articles will look differently messy and won't interlink properly.
Because it's powered by the same software, the help pages on Wikipedia offer general guidance.
Owain
Agreed, a starting point would be to produce a navigation structure and page template - but I think it would be nice to know that there are enough people who would want to contribute to it before doing this.
Also additional documentation here:
Yes, and this is an issue. We have so many threads on ukdiy with people chasing each other down the page I can only expect the same there. Due to the format that may mean edit wars.
Sounds like a lot of work to get around what is a weak point in the first place with wiki. Personally I wanted to keep the whole thing simple, as the less work it all is the longer it lives and the more articles it accumulates.
Tell me, so we know what the various options are, is there a way to use wordpress but have it appear more like wikipedia? If so, could we get the advantages of both worlds? User familiarity with wiki, but edit-war proof.
NT
Yes, the look is very much up to us.
There are many other CMSs, WordPress is a good one, but it isn't the only one. A good way of tackling this might be to start off by defining what functionality we want.
OK I've put up an article I've been knocking up on DHW systems. Please feel free to read & edit....
(search for Hot Water - there doesn't seem to be an article index)
Sir, sir ... Owain's been editing _my_ page!
BSF ... is there no way to upload images on the test system? Should be In the sidebar, under toolbox, click "Upload file", according to The Friendly Manual wot I Read.
I've enabled this now. You must be logged in to upload files.
I'm having trouble with categories. I added a [[Category:Plumbing]] tag to the Plumbing _page_ but when I followed the Category: link at the bottom of the page I got:
""""""" Editing Category:Plumbing From DIYWiki Jump to: navigation, search
You've followed a link to a page that doesn't exist yet. To create the page, start typing in the box below (see the help page for more info). If you are here by mistake, just click your browser's back button. Preview
Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data. Please try again. If it still doesn't work, try logging out and logging back in. """""""
If I just 'Save page' with an empty page and again try to follow the link I get the same error. However if I create a page with some random text and save that I get correctly directed to the newly created Category page. I can then edit it and delete the random text, save again and I still get to the new page (which is what I want). Odd.
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