[rt-users] The RT Wiki - Restructure (start using categories?)

[Ruslan Zakirov]

Hi,

Idea is good. Here are some ideas about categorizing and where people
with MediaWiki experience can help kickstart content improvements.

I think good and easy point to start is to organize installation guides.

There are lot of pages that are sort of user profiles. They should get
particular category, for example OldStyleUserProfile. Some of them are
linked from http://requesttracker.wikia.com/wiki/RTUsers. May be we
can replace this page with generated page that links to wikia's user
profiles.

User Manual is a special beast. It should be continuous reading and at
the same time splitted into smaller topics. I believe MediaWiki has
some tools to include content of pages into other pages.

Every config option and right should get a page matching its name,
however they should get included into other blocks. For example
WebDomain, WebPath, WebPort and couple of options should be described
as one thing. For example OwnTicket and ownership related rights
should be described as one thing. I don't know media wiki best
practices to organize such thing.

FAQ may win from better structure. At this moment it's not very managable.

There are more, but enough for today. I think that if you find a good
solution for some particular problem and describe how it should be
done then people would help you clean cages and normalize content.
Just split things into smaller steps.

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Bart <bart at pleh.info> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Jay, thanks for your input. I do feel that approaching it with a blank sheet
> of paper will be the best approach.
>
> Though we'll have to use Wikia's abilities/structure, the below is aimed at
> just that with a slight eye on "structuring from scratch".
>
> --- A rough sketch of the idea ---
>
> The idea I have relies allot on the categories within Wikia.
>
> A categorie page can contain content, thus e.g. the contributions page could
> instead be a categorie page with some specific information on what you can
> expect, maybe some extra links to other stuff, etc. But the difference would
> be that since it is now a categorie page, that all scripts/contributions
> that have the categorie set to contributions would be automatically listed
> on that one page. (alphabetized)
>
> With that in mind you can quite easily create "general" categorie pages for
> all major topics and have any page regarding that topic being linked to that
> categorie.
>
> The front page would then contain a hierarchical structure with links to all
> the "sections" (a.k.a. categorie pages). And obviously information on what
> RT is, latest news/updates/etc. Another thing which you can easily add to
> the front page is an RSS feed of the Bestpractical blog, and maybe add a
> feed of the RT wiki itself showing the latest updates & newest pages.
> (should both be doable I think)
>
> Other things that might be nice to add are some Wikia features for the
> community to promote the usage of the RT wiki (achievements and other fun
> stuff).
>
> --- The structure (concept) ---
>
> Since the above shows what categories and categorie pages can do for you
> it's important to create a structure (at first on paper) which will make
> sure that all major topics regarding RT are covered so that any new article
> can add a categorie appropriate for that specific article. (I assume that
> the structure will eventually grow naturally)
>
> Since this is just a concept I've sort of just looked at the current wiki
> and tried to gather some basic topics, what I want to achieve with this
> concept is to get input from others so that we can improve it further:
>
> RT Basics
>
> User Manual
> Custom Fields
> Articles
> REST
> RT Tool
> RT Cron Tool
>
> RT Installation (rough categories so that people can link install guides to
> an OS categorie, no more/no less)
>
> Linux
> FreeBSD
> Other
> Manual
>
> RT Config: (a categorie for each major release)
>
> RT 4
> RT 3.8
> RT 3.6
>
> Plugins:
>
> A categorie page for all plugins! This way you can link scrips/configs/other
> goodies for a plugin to that specific categorie page.
>
> Scrips:
>
> Basically a summary of all scrips available for RT.
>
> Automation
>
> At this point I'm blank on ideas, I'll just leave it at this and see what
> responses there are. I'm pretty sure this list can be better/structured
> better, but you have to start somewhere ^_~
>
> --- Rough plan of action ---
>
> This is a rather rough plan for setting up the structure:
>
> Remove all current categories (double check that the categorie pages don't
> contain content of any kind).
> Add every single page currently in the wiki to a new categorie called
> "Archive".
>
> This sounds ugly but it's an easy way of keeping track of all the wiki pages
> that still need better categorization.
> Basically a todo list, anything still in there needs to be categorized.
> The idea is to do a few articles each day and eventually everything will be
> nicely categorized.
>
> Create all the categories which have been though of, make sure that theres's
> at least some basic information on the categorie page.
> Modify the home page to, at first, also contain the new categorie structure
> (keep the old links for now).
> Start categorizing anything that's still in under Archive.
> And last but not least, at a certain point modify the front page to only
> contain the new categorie structure.
>
> So, those are some ideas.
>
> Time for everyone to shoot at them ^_~
>
> -- Bart
>
> --------
> RT Training Sessions (http://bestpractical.com/services/training.html)
> * Boston — TBA



-- 
Best regards, Ruslan.