CMS for publishing FAQ articles

This is new to me too - I'll read some documentation and see what I can find out.

So what are people's thoughts on a wiki? More people seem in favour of this than a more controlled CMS (such as WordPress). If we have a consensus forming, then there is no reason not to adopt this and start building navigation and content.

Now that I've had a chance, I've created a subdomain for it, so from now on please access it here:

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will leave the other subdomain in place for now, but it will get deleted in a week or so.

Reply to
Grunff
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I really think it should be not possible for one person to edit another's article. We know what it'll lead to otherwise. Good to enable comments to be added afterward, but not in the original article itself.

Unless you want drivel or similar to correct all our articles.

NT

Reply to
meow2222

The wiki software does allow articles to be locked or semi-locked and users or IP addresses to be barred. I hope there's a rollback mechanism for undoing edits too.

If vandalism is a problem, pages could be locked unless there's an actual discussion/update on a particular topic.

Owain

Reply to
Owain

Just thought it might be worthwhile wikifying the normal FAQ or splitting it into separate articles to kick this off?

I'm convinced a wiki is the right way to go but you need to tie down user rights as well as the system allows i.e anonymous edits aren't ever allowed and every user has to provide a verifiable email address. A group of sysops, preferably prolific (useful) contributors from here would need to be appointed to stamp down on any Dribble/Bacon/Firth type content that might sneak through.

While this site is not DIY related this url shows what can be done with a wiki that doesn't look too much like wikipedia (it's running standard mediawiki)

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Reply to
Matt

I like the wiki. A well tried and comfortable interface for most people, I think.

Good luck with the project and thanks for the hosting and the work you are putting in.

Steve

Reply to
Steve

That's different from the philosophy of wikis which are specifically about collective authorship and ownership of content. It's also IMHO better aligned with a usenet FAQ which is the collective knowledge and wisdom of the group rather than of any particular members. (Not to be confused with any naive PC dogma that everyone is equally expert: more about recognising that there are usually many experts in any field and arriving at a consensus.)

Wikipedia have exactly the same setup: anyone can edit anything, (except in a very few cases) and generally it works. Helped by having history and rollback to counter vandalism.

Shall we try it and see?

Reply to
John Stumbles

While my personal view tends to lean that way, we do seem to have a majority who prefer the wiki approach to a more controlled CMS. As such, I suggest we give the wiki a go.

Please feel free to build content and navigation, you can now consider the wiki a permanent feature. If I need to move it onto another server in future, all the content will move with it.

Just to repeat, please make sure you access it at this url:

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Reply to
Grunff

I don't think you *really* meant to say "correct"

Reply to
Matt

You're most welcome, I look forward to seeing how it develops :-)

Reply to
Grunff

This is where the fun starts.

How does everyone feel about this? Free-for-all editing? User account only editing?

I'm quite happy to do some styling if it proves sufficiently popular. I'll even get our graphic designer to do a full site design if necessary; that should result in a fantastic looking site.

Reply to
Grunff

I think it's really good - John's Domestic Hot Water Systems article really shows the potential of what a good article might look like. Presentation is very easy on the eyes IMO - a perfect complement to this group.

Good luck and thanks for taking the time :)

Tim

Reply to
Tim S

I honestly think this is a mistake. It gives us 2 problems:

First anyone that comes along can for whatever reason make a mess of articles. I'm not saying drigonig to bble but who knows who or for what reason. And we know that edit wars are a real world problem. This in turn means extra work for the maintainers, then non-clear cut cases get discusses / argued over on ukdiy... none of this is necessary.

2nd there is a real tendency with this format iron out the real world range of views that exist. The most informative pieces are where differing views are presented in one thread, and the user makes what they will of them - and neither piece is chopped about to lose or change its meaning. And that approach means much less work input from us. We can pretty much leave contributors to it.

NT

Reply to
meow2222

I did suggest as much in the original thread but got no takers - snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com refers. Well it was in Wordpress context then, but Wordpress/Wiki are similar contenders, though Wiki seems to be getting the vote at the moment.

One thing I find difficulty with, and hasn't been answered yet, is finding a complete contents list for articles in any of the examples that have been mentioned. I hope I'm missing something, but in both Wordpress and Wiki, it seems that you have to traverse all the links in order to discover the totality of what's covered, whereas in the present FAQ you have a clear contents list. So again the question I have is: can a structure like the one I mentioned in the first thread be embodied in a Wiki/Wordpress implementation? see

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more important question is: How can the overall structure be controlled so that articles are put in a logical place in a sub-tree in the first place? I fear there will a tendency for new articles to be just dropped onto the top level. If the 'master editors' don't like where an article has been placed, will they be able to move it to a new location? I am very worried by the statement in grunff's Wiki testbed
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that "... titles seem to be one thing that's almost impossible to change in a wiki." If it's that hard to change a title I imagine restructuring is even worse. I hope we don't have to resort to deletion and recreation to achieve a 'move', that is, if you

*can* delete an article within the concept of edit history being retained.

Most definitely one would need to exert control over who is given accounts. Allowing every Tom, Dick and Drivel to register and edit is asking for trouble. I would like to see new members' edits moderated (by whom?) until such time as the moderator trusts them. And that moderation ideally should not be a simple accept/reject criteria, but be an interactive correspondence with the editors to offer feedback and recommendations for bringing the style and presentation up to 'house standard', in other word, the same as what happens with the main FAQ.

Being able to verify new contributors' email address and IP before allowing them to have an editing powers is essential to prevent trolls or the like getting in with fake IDs. A verification system, as used on many sites, where you have to respond to an email sent to your address should achieve that.

Yes, there must be someone (or several) with the final say whether an article is fit to publish or not. A facility for putting up drafts for review/comment would be handy - or should those continue to be posted here? or both?

level menu without actually traversing it. I suppose if that facility does not exist in the Wiki, it wouldn't be too hard to have a piece of non-Wiki software to traverse the site and create an index page.

Reply to
Phil Addison

The question of structure is important. 2 things I think that are necessary are:

  1. A complete contents listing
  2. Any article can appear in more than one place in the tree - many discussions are germaine to more than one area. Classic examples are gas/heating/plumbing, or electrics/style/energy saving and many others.

Talk about creating work... we dont need to create ourselves any work if the article is like a forum thread in that others can add their own comments after, but not cut it about.

Or maybe a vote rating of each article as t how accurate people think it is. Just trying to get away from creating ourselves a pile of work.

NT

Reply to
meow2222

We recently changed the UK_Selfbuild FAQ to a WIKI gave write access to a few, will save on updates.

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Reply to
Rick Hughes

FWIW, I agree with your argument totally - I personally don't think a wiki is the way to go. However, I think we're outvoted at present.

Reply to
Grunff

The answer is yes.

With WordPress, it is trivial to generate a fully nested menu of all the articles, either on the homepage or in the navigation menu.

With MediaWiki, it is a little more work, but still perfectly possible to generate a navigation menu that contains links to all articles, categorised by group/sub-group.

The concept of categories in wiki context is a very loose one. An article (or page, if you wish) should be thought of as a standalone chunk of data, which is only related to other articles (including index pages and article lists) by virtue of the links we insert into those pages.

This is in contrast with WordPress, where the article/category relationship is clear.

Moving an article from one category to another in the wiki is simply a matter of editing the article list, to place that article in the correct category, and editing the article to reflect the category it's in.

I will take a look at the MediaWiki functionality to see what is possible. Certainly email verification can be switched on, but I'm not sure what moderation tools are built in.

But how does 'final say' ever work in a wiki context? Someone could come along and simply edit the article afterwards.

Harder than you might think, again because of the lack of category structure within the database. This is one of the reasons I dislike the idea of using a wiki for this - I like structure ;-)

Reply to
Grunff

something you added on?

Reply to
Grunff

In mediawiki you put a tag in the article saying what category it belongs to.

If the FAQ gets very big this becomes unmanagegable so a good search engine is probably more useful. Arguably users are more likely to search for 'boiler' than navigate some tree such as plumbing -> gas -> appliances

-> boilers

In mediawiki one can assign an article to more than one category so e.g. gas boilers might be in categories plumbing heating & gas.

And yet this is exactly what wikipedia does and they survive, possibly by virtue of there being enough good folks keeping things sane to deal with daftness, and it bing relatively easy to revert to earlier versions of material.

Reply to
John Stumbles

Are you referring to this ?

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almost meets what I want to see; and it would if there was an always visible link that generated it to full depth (or perhaps to optional depths) on demand. There is also a 'move' feature in docuwiki, so that answers an earlier query.

As is probably clear, I am new to wiki internals;) With the examples mentioned so far, I find their opening page very cluttered and not at all clear where the meat is found. Is the pre-occupation with explaining what a wiki is, and references to developers tools, built-in to these wikis, or is it just an the way the author(s?) decided to do it?

Does it tell us something that although the sbfaq is done as a docuwiki, the hosting site is actually done in Wordpress?

Have you found the

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which compares many (all?) wikis?

I'm all questions today!!

Reply to
Phil Addison

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