Difference between revisions of "Talk:Documentation/Dashboard/Wiki Editing Policy"

Revision as of 11:52, 30 June 2018

Martina, could you (or anyone else) give some rationales behind the policies? Some questions might be: Why should the localized content follow the same structure as the english? Why shouldn't wiki names be translated? What is the advantage of using the DISPLAYTITLE directive? How can the page be searched/found best? Why should the Country Code be on the first place (and not e.g. /Documentation/DE/...) Thanks --nino 21:35, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

A couple of answers to some good questions... --ccornell 11:18, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Why should the Country Code be on the first place (and not e.g. /Documentation/DE/...)

The rationale behind this decision was simply an attempt to group all contributions for a given language under that language's ISO code. In the DE example you get /DE as the main hub for all DE language pages. Under that DE landing page or hub, you get DE/Documentation which is all translated or original authored DE documentation. You also get... DE/FAQ and so on. Then you can apply the same to the French language pages... they are grouped under FR, and under the FR landing page or hub you get FR/Documentation and FR/FAQ and so on.

What is the advantage of using the DISPLAYTITLE directive?

The DISPLAYTITLE allows us to clean up the title shown at the top of the page. When you use sub-pages as we are doing in the OOoWiki, the Subpage title can get very very long. The DISPLAYTITLE allows us to shorten that down to something more human readable. It's a tradeoff for using sub-pages to group content. We have a shorter page title which is easier to read, but we have a page that is a little harder to link to when you are linking from another page (you have to copy the right part of the URL instead of just copying the page name).

This also allows the localized pages to have a correct localized wiki page title instead of the English title that would be shown by default. See the next question for more on why this situation happens.

How can the page be searched/found best?

You should be able to simply search on the title (or part of the title) given by the DISPLAYTITLE, and get the page back in your search results. The MediaWiki search engine is not the best... a Google Search (using the Google Search extension) will give better results. This extension is only implemented on the English Documentation page at this point. It will take some work to broaden its scope to cover other parts of the Wiki or to replace the default MediaWiki search with a Google search. Possible... but not being worked on right now.

Why should the localized content follow the same structure as the english? Why shouldn't wiki names be translated?

This simplifies the Interwiki linking (a tool that we use to link pages of one language to all other languages that page is available in). If we have different sub-page structures and page naming for localized content, we cannot easily use Templates to add in Interwiki links. It is possible to use Interwiki linking without this limitation on page naming, but then we would have to manually maintain the Interwiki linking on every page of a set of Wiki pages instead of just using a common Template to do the linking. With a single page such as Main Page, the page naming and style can be anything appropriate for the language linked to. In a Wiki Book, we want to use one Interwiki template per book, and this limits us somewhat in the page naming conventions. If we use a common naming style, the Template is simple and works effectively. If we allow free-form structure and page naming, the Interwiki linking via templates becomes impossible, and we would have to fall back on manual linking.

For an example of how this works, take a look at the Administration Guide. It is available in 4 languages. They all use the common structure and page naming. We can easily link from one language to the next on every page of the document using the "InterWiki Languages AdminGuide" Template. If a fifth language is added to the mix, no extra work is needed other than to add the language once per document to the Template, and make sure that the template call in the original English document remains (with no changes) in the new translation. Without this we would have to edit every page of the document in every language to add in the cross links to each new language... not a nice alternative.

Using Categories

Now the manual states:
You can use Templates to add a common category to a large group of pages, but it is not recommended. It may appear to save time, but "adding or deleting a category tag in the template does not add or delete the listings on the category page of pages that use the template, until some edit is made in the page that uses the template."

This is not true. I conducted an experiment on this template Template:RUkbWriterBottom, adding and deleting categories Category:Тестовая_категория. When you add this category in the template - it appeared on all pages using this template. After removing this category from the template - it is automatically removed from all pages using the template.

I think it may be advisable to use the categories in the templates.

--Санчо 14:20, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Try your test again... when you add the Category to the template, it does show up on the pages, but.. it's not included in the Category:Categoryname page unless you do an edit/save on the page that uses the template. So the page appears to be a Category member... but it is not indexed into the Category correctly. --ccornell 07:53, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

The inclusion of categories in the template described in the documentation mediawiki. This is a standard way of working templates. Санчо 16:24, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps I see a misunderstanding here. There are two distinct cases: 1) adding a template (with a category) to a page, and 2) adding a category to a template (which already has pages that use it). Case 1) will work fine; Case 2) will partially fail. --TJ (Talk | Contribs) 23:29, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Case 1 will work initially because you are saving the page that uses a Template with a Category. If you then change the Category in the Template of add a new Category, the change will not be indexed correctly unless you re-edit the original page and save it. This is as documented in the MediaWiki documentation. Both of these cases have nothing to do with what Sancho linked regarding Categorizing templates and using the to keep the Category in the Template only (and not add the Category to any pages the Template used on). --ccornell 07:47, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

New templates for text formatting

I propose to use the new templates:

outdated naming convention for usernames ?

- the entry: Click on Log in / create account in the upper right corner of the screen and enter the required bits. We recommend using the same username as on the OpenOffice.org website. seems outdated to me, at least I cannot find something with usernames on openoffice.org ??