From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Michael Tremer To: documentation@lists.ipfire.org Subject: Re: New wiki painful to use Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2019 14:56:05 +0100 Message-ID: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============1214696949306584464==" List-Id: --===============1214696949306584464== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Hello, I know that you did not intend this as such, but I am a little angry with you= r email. So I hope that we can work this out and that I can explain why things are as = they are at the moment and what I am going to do about it. First of all: There is no time to work on this. I have been doing nothing els= e but infrastructure and admin work around the project for the last four week= s. I am barely able to respond to my email. One emergency after the other is = happening and I am doing =E2=80=9Cquick and dirty=E2=80=9D on more things tha= n I would like to. Bare this in mind. This is also the reason why I am a bit = on the edge. > On 12 Aug 2019, at 22:42, Jon Murphy wrote: >=20 > In my opinion: I feel you=E2=80=99re going to see a drop-off of user writte= n wiki pages. The new wiki is very painful to use! (I do understand there a= re not many users writing wiki pages.) We have virtually nobody contributing to the wiki. There are a couple of reas= ons. The technical one is that nobody can register an account. Some people ha= ve asked for it and never edited a single line. I think many people see a wik= i as a read-only kind of data source. Something that I think Wikipedia has cr= eated. People just see it as a book. And you simply don=E2=80=99t edit books. So, this cannot really get worse in my opinion. But this is not news either. = A couple of years ago we have thrown away all translations into which some pe= ople have put a lot of effort, but they are old, outdated, unmaintained and c= onfused people even more. I think that that is true for a lot of the English = wiki as well and my personal opinion here is to just throw it away. False inf= ormation is worse than none. > Most of this is related to the lack of a user interface with built-in short= cuts for bold, italics, links, code blocks, etc. The wiki really needs a pro= per user interface like what was available with the old wiki or what is avail= able with the forum. On that: I have said that the wiki was stitched together a little bit. It was= an experiment that has become reality now. It is work in progress. I have as= ked for feedback and I got little. I do not think that many open points were = left that could have easily been implemented. This is why I wasn=E2=80=99t to= o happy to read this email now, because I would have preferred some construct= ive ideas and help over this now. > Is there not another wiki to fit the need? Like a competitor to Dokuwiki? = I=E2=80=99d hate to think the IPFire firewall devs would need to be spending = their time creating a new wiki. =20 I would absolutely not have gone through this work if I thought that there wa= s anything out there. All projects I have checked out use outdated or custom = software. Web software has died a very ugly death recently. We have the same = problem with the forum. In the end it is easier to put a wiki together on our own than spending hours= and hours of customising some software that breaks as soon as you install an= update (i.e. our forum which is now un-themed and unpatched for a very long = time). So this is the basis we have to work with right now. > Did the https://github.com/benweet/stackedit.js not work? This project hasn=E2=80=99t been updated in years. I am not going to integrat= e legacy software into something new. > Nothing written above is meant to hurt anyone=E2=80=99s feelings or make an= yone mad. I=E2=80=99m just personally frustrated working in the new wiki env= ironment knowing I=E2=80=99ve only touched 80 pages and we have 300+ pages to= go! Ugh! I am not taking it as such, but I share your frustration. I am also quite fru= strated about seeing loads of HTML and only the word =E2=80=9Cupdate=E2=80=9D= in the change log. This is not how this was intended and we have talked abou= t why this is a bad idea. -Michael >=20 > Jon >=20 > _______________________________________________ > Documentation mailing list > Documentation(a)lists.ipfire.org > https://lists.ipfire.org/mailman/listinfo/documentation --===============1214696949306584464==--