Rahul Sundaram wrote:

Hi

We have been managing feedback on the official Fedora websites, currently http://fedora.redhat.com and http://fedoraproject.org/wiki through bugzilla and discussions in the marketing list. It makes sense to have a independent mailing list -> fedora-websites-list which can also be used for discussing wiki pages. The wiki has good amount of community buy-in and the amount of content being added is growing rapidly. While this is indeed a positive development we need to make sure the content is organized and kept updated.

Also worth noting is that creating fedora-websites-list vs. fedora-wiki-list allows this to cover not just the wiki, but f.r.c and other websites that may now or in the future be under the umbrella of the Fedora Project. We can also allow others who run third-party sites, such as Thomas Chung and Bob Jensen, to weigh in on the official sites and follow along with the direction the project is taking. This perfectly compliments the new Bugzilla component created for the same purpose.

Patrick Barnes has been keeping a good eye on this in general and I guess we can declare him the wiki master which is essentially the role he is performing .Going ahead, it might be a good idea to introduce a concept of "ownership" to each of the wiki pages. Every page would have a comment on top which declares the owner. Everyone in the edit group should have their own wiki pages filled out with atleast the contact information . Every page is also subscribed atleast by the owner of that page to monitor changes and keep the content relevant and updated.

It may take time to establish 'best practices' for new EditGroup members, but having a head to roll if problems occur is the entire reason we have the EditGroup in the first place. We should encourage all EditGroup members to provide at least one method of contact on their wiki homepage.

This process would help us make sure that unmaintained pages are marked as such and provide hints to users on what could be potentially outdated. It would also provide a list of pages that new wiki users can take care of and it provides accountability for the wiki itself.

Encouraging EditGroup members to take up unmaintained pages will also help us clean up areas of the site that have long been ignored, and will help us reduce the number of orphaned pages on the wiki. Accountability really isn't the top concern here, IMHO. It is a measure that can greatly benefit the quality of the wiki. Translating this same idea to other Fedora materials that don't already have this kind of measure would surely also be advantageous.

Applying this particular method to the Docs arena would be doubly valuable. I would imagine that this would be easier and more reliable than simply maintaining a long list of writers and editors. Since this will be implemented as comments, it would both be very flexible and would be easy to filter out or parse where needed when converting or publishing documents.

Suggestions welcome.

regards Rahul

For reference, a line declaring the owner of a document can be added to the beginning of the document to look like this:

##owner FooBar = Document Title = And document contents.

As a matter of best practice, these comments should probably come after parsing instructions or ACL lines.

For Docs, using ##writer and ##editor might also be of interest.

Any thoughts?