Re: Aw: IPFire Wiki Workflow

[Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>]

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On Wed, 2013-07-10 at 23:02 +0200, Bernhard Bitsch wrote:
> At the moment the Wiki is in many places just a collection of articles someone thought of it would be interesting for the community.
> This results in a lack of completeness and actuality.
> 
> Therefore your suggestion about a step by step revision of the chapters is good way to achieve higher quality.

I was not only aiming at rewriting one section after an other, but
rather building a workflow where all people have got a certain task and
produce some sophisticated output.

Again, not everything on the wiki is bad.

> Let me add my favourite suggestion: An article should be written by a native speaker, or the "final" version must be corrected and revised by such a team member.

We don't have enough native speakers for all the languages at the
moment. It's one of the problems we have to fix in the beginning.

As a lot of the work on the wiki is translating texts from one language
into an other, most of the team members need to speak more than one
language.

> The main reason is, usually the most exact description of a fact can be done in the language you have the most experience, the mother language. This is an experience from many years of work in software development.
> This means that an article written by someone with knowledge of a topic originates in her/his native language. And should be translated by the translation team. I realise, that this results in scattered Wiki in the first phase. But for clearness we should dare this.

We are all very (maybe most) eloquent in our mother language, but we
also need a common denominator which is English. In our current
situation we don't have any experts who speak for example French.
Therefore nobody is writing original documentation in French. But we do
have people who are able to translate content from English to French and
that helps us to provide documentation to people who only speak French.

I would suggest to make a simple rule, which has to be strictly
followed. It would solve the problem that the different translations are
drifting apart: Every change has to be done in English first. No matter
if it is just adding a tiny piece of information or writing an entire
new page.
By doing that, the translators always have a valid and up to date
reference which is English, which most people speak as a second
language.

> I hope, I was successful in expressing my thoughts in English. ;)

Yes, you were. See? It's already working.

-Michael