Talk:Directory

Rationale

There was a recent change to the MediaWiki software, which meant that any page names containing a '/' character would be conceptually treated as hierarchical pages, and the software would automagically render a navigation bar at the top of the page, to navigate the hierarchy.

There is one key problem with this approach, as far as I'm aware, and that is the database does not take these relationships into account. Consequently, if you were to have...

• Books
  • Books/Fiction
  • Books/Non-fiction

...and wanted to rename 'Books' to 'All texts', you'd end up with...

• All texts
  • Books/Fiction
  • Books/Non-fiction

...and not...

• All texts
  • All texts/Fiction
  • All texts/Non-fiction

...as you might expect.

Arguably this should be changed in software, but I have a feeling it's going to be a little tricky.

The site's hierarchy currently seems to be implied by the layout of sections on the Main page, but in my experience has been that these pages are designed to look good, rather than to be comprehensive.

Additionally, this inter-page-navigation, of an implicit hierarchy of pages, can be achieved by either categorizing pages, and creating category hierarchies, or creating templates which are added to each page they index. These solutions present other problems.

It's common, and correct, to include pages logically in many categories, whose scopes may overlap. By creating hard, defined, mutually-exclusive categories in a hierarchical fashion, there is less confusion as to what content goes where.

Obviously, it's going to be a lot simpler if we don't have to maintain category pages, and template pages for this purpose, but they can still be very effective, and should not be discouraged.

Provisional hierarchy

• Projects - What are the goals? This is arguably most important. If you understand these, and can be bold, and can take a neutral point of view, perhaps unemotional point of view, you will probably never get into any problems with other users (including edit wars) and can thus maximize your use of the system.
  • MediaWiki - The software. Describe where to send bug reports/feature requests.
  • Wikimedia projects - These may arguably cross-over with 'policy', but the idea is that these should briefly sum up the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. Only members of the Wikimedia Foundation ought to be able to change the spirit of the law, but they seem to allow reasonable flexibility as to its interpretation. These must all be together so a user can see, at a glance, which site is going to be most appropriate for the sort of content they wish to submit. They should include a rough guide to appropriate content for that wiki, possibly including recommended use of namespaces. This will hopefully solve 90% of VfD cases, and discussions on page naming and namespace use.
    • Meta-Wiki
      • Main namespace - Content relating to Wikimedia
      • Help namespace - Content relating to MediaWiki
      • Meta namespace - Content relating to Meta-Wiki (arguably a subset of main namespace, so this will be fuzzy)
    • Wikipedia
    • Wikibooks
    • Wiktionary
    • Wikisource
    • Wikispecies
    • Wikicommons
    • Wikiversity
    • Wikijunior
    • Babel templates
    • etc.
  • Project translations
  • How to propose a new project or translation

• People - Who's helping achieve the goals?
  • The Wikimedia Foundation - The organisation which funds the projects
  • Wikimedians (historically titled Wikipedians) - The primary content contributors

• Politics - How are they doing it?
  • Power structure
  • Policy - Up-to-date policy docs
  • Proposed policy docs
  • Historical policy docs

• Forums - Pages used in the style of talk pages to discuss various issues. The idea being that all general talk goes on here. Each wiki will still want its own forum-esque pages for those issues which are clearly within its own scope. Encourage users to logically split forums into new forums with a more specific scope. These may eventually evolve into workable policy documents, at which point they can be removed again.
  • General - Anything outside the scope of the other forums.
  • Politics - Discussing new policy, although users should be advised to aim create a policy doc, on which the talk page will decide its content.
  • Authoring - Advice on correct use of wiki-markup and [X]HTML
  • Technical - Advice on installing MediaWiki software
  • Requests for new projects
  • Requests for translations
  • Requests for deletions - Local and global
  • Requests for permissions - Local and global
  • etc.

Merge with Meta:Index

The Index is much more established than the directory, both on Meta and other wikis. It's also much easier to find, since all indexed pages are backlinked to it. I propose the directory be merged into and redirect to it. —{admin} Pathoschild 04:32, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Looking at Directory/Projects I think you can simply delete Directory/* --217.184.142.16 10:30, 1 May 2008 (UTC)