Gnome Live Wiki Day (and other wiki-ish ideas)?

["John Stowers" <john stowers lists gmail com>]

Hey,
 
One of the cool things that Ubuntu did (and still does), is host a wiki day. Like a bug day, but where everyone is encouraged to work on the wiki. I think this would be a fantastic idea for us to do.
 
We are in a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg dance at the moment with 
developer.gnome.org, live.gnome.org and library.gnome.org. I think that a valuable first step would be to transfer over all relevant content from 
developer.gnome.org into the wiki. I am presuming that library.gnome.org will be wiki based, and for ease of maintenance I think moin-moin (what 
live.gnome.org runs) is probbably a good choice.
 
If we were going to (hypothetically) host a wiki day I think the following things would be required prior to that happening
1) Identification of categories. That way classification and movement of pages into categories can be done (see how extensively and well they use categories on 
wiki.ubuntu.com)
2) Some kind of go ahead from the admins of developer.gnome.org that it is dying a slow death and it would be a step in the right direction to put the still relevant content into 
live.gnome.org
3) Some kind of tentative go ahead from the authority on the plans of live.gnome.org that it may well use moinmoin also and any wiki formatting done on 
live.gnome.org would not be wasted time because it may be reused on library.gnome.org
4) Brainstorming about how the worlds best wiki (
live.gnome.org) should be structured
 
Possible tasks for wiki days could include
5) Putting pages into categories
6) Spell checking pages
7) Being ruthless and deleting stuff that is super old in the wiki or will never have any use
8) Development of a release script so that projects, when they make a release, update their wiki page accordingly (I could do this, see below)
 
And on another and semi related note I have been playing with the stand-alone latest version of moin-moin [1]. The latest version of moin-moin has two quite nice, and potentially useful for us features; xml-rpc interface, and docbook export[2]. I am hacking together a proof of concept modification that uses the stand alone version of moin-moin to let people contribute documentation to gnome in an easier way. Essentially this is done by the following 
 
1) The local copy of the users moin-moin installation is automatically synced with the current contents of the wikibased user guide using xml-rpc[3]
2) The user makes some changes, editing the gnome user docs using the wysiwyg editor in moin-moin
3) The user then clicks a "submit back to gnome" button and their changes are posted back to live.gnome.org via xml-rpc. (they could also be emailed to someone, or ftp uploaded somewhere, etc) 
 
Now I think that is almost the beginning of the often talked about new gnome documentation system. It may also need the following features to be a reality and useful
a) Automatically synchronisation from the gnome wiki to the svn copy of gnome-user-guide or vice-versa (very do-able. There are a few hacks around for moin-moin to svn extensions)
b) The server running live.gnome.org runs an old version of python which is incompatible with docbook export (and also has other bugs which you may have all noticed when using the wiki; search etc). I presume this upgradeable if given a good enough reason 
c) Moin-moin docbook export improvements (do-able if motivated enough)
d) An option which allows the user to show their local modified copy of the docs in Yelp. (do-able, just docbook export the contents to a file and point yelp at it)
 
Anyway sorry about this long email, thoughts?
 
John
 
[1] http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/DesktopEdition
[2] append ?action="" to the end of a page of a recent version of moinmoin. 
e.g
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/DesktopEdition?action="">
[3] 
http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/UserGuide