[Infrastructure] Wiki Review

[Ryan Sleevi]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 3:20 PM Jos Purvis (jopurvis) <jopurvis at cisco.com>
wrote:

> After last week’s meeting and some intervening thought, I wanted to put
> this out there and let it percolate: we can discuss it here and then pick
> it up at the next meeting as well.
>
>
>
> When we migrated to Dokuwiki a year ago (was it only a year? How time
> flies when you’re coping with global disasters…), much of the discussions
> around choice of software revolved around what people had experience
> operating, as the wiki options available were generally equivalent. We’ve
> now had a year in the new software to shake things out and find our feet,
> and I’ve definitely heard some issues people still have:
>
>    - Uploading and linking media is difficult and non-obvious;
>    - Dokuwiki basically forces wiki-markup editing mode rather than
>    WYSIWYG, as the WYSIWYG plugin is unpredictably functional—indeed, that’s
>    one thing that blocked us from upgrading to the latest Dokuwiki, as it’s
>    not compatible with the new version and its author doesn’t seem inclined to
>    fix that;
>    - The markdown interpretation in Dokuwiki creates extra work in
>    translating from email notes and Etherpad, as indentation and lists are
>    prickly and particular about formatting.
>
>
>
> Those are the issues I’m aware of. My questions are these:
>
>    1. Is the list of issues above complete? Are there others to be added?
>    Should these be tracked in GH issues or similar?
>
> Does Dokuwiki even support Markdown (I mean, absent a plugin)? Am I
holding it wrong? Just updating the GH pull request instructions was... a
pulling and gnashing of teeth, and it's decidedly non-Markdown syntax
didn't help :)


>
>    1.
>    2. How happy are we with Dokuwiki as a platform overall? Should we
>    poll the Forum to find out their level of satisfaction with it?
>    3. How should we prioritize fixing these issues? Are they serious
>    enough (individually or in aggregate) to warrant exploring moving to
>    another platform?
>
>

> Overall, I think there’s something to be said for polling the Forum for
> their satisfaction with our current suite of tools (GH, Dokuwiki, Webex),
> but I wanted to start with the wiki as the first step as it’s the one I’ve
> heard the most grumbling about.
>

I'm encouraged that Dokuwiki is the one that have folks the loudest ;)

That said, I'm concerned re: prioritization. Is the Wiki all that
interacted with? Is the most grumbling tied to the most disruption to the
day-to-day activities of the Forum?

I would think our main areas would be on the regular activities: preparing
(and previewing) ballots and ballot production, enabling ballot discussion,
critical infrastructure like the mail list, tools for notetaking
(Etherpad?) and tracking (project boards and issues?), things of that
nature. In short, automating the most time-consuming tasks and making sure
the day-to-day functioning is smooth.
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