Under Construction: New Wiki Underway

You may have noticed we have some exciting work going on to revamp the openSUSE wiki, and if you’re interested in helping with that, we have some requests to make. We’ve seen several attemps to improve the wiki piecemeal, to varying degrees of success. In order to achieve the goals we’ve set this time, we’ve decided to start from scratch with a core team of passionate wiki contributors.

This team is working on several tasks:

• Setting up a new wiki server and instalilng an extension to allow for a quality assurance (QA) process for all articles in the future. We’re also working with an extension to help organize, search, tag, browse, evaluate, and share the wiki content. This task is done and we’re now working on the next stages.

• Establishing a QA process. We’ll be utilizing the extensions so that every new article or edit will be marked “to be reviewed.” Every article will be reviewed by a board on the forums, and once it’s up to the quality standards, it will be released. This is a work in progress.

• We’re also creating writing guidelines for contributors, templates for the new wiki, portal pages, and scanning the existing content and deciding what to transfer to the new wiki.

As mentioned, all tasks are being done by the wiki team. We’d ask members who are not part of this team to participate in our mentoring session and to coordinate with us on our mailinglist before jumping in. We appreciate anyone who would like to assist, of course, but we want to do this in a coordinated fashion to ensure success.

If you have any questions about the new wiki effort, please ask on the opensuse-wiki mailing list or in #opensuse-wiki on IRC. Thanks, and have a great holiday!