[D-community-discuss] knowledge base structure

[Nico Dietrich]

Yeah -
it's great to see this effort towards building a debian user community 
arising! I've been thinking about doing something like that some months ago, 
but never got started, so it's great someone actually does something and I'm 
happiest joining forces.

As it's late in the night, and I'm in the middle of exam preparations, I'm 
just trying to summarize what I'd like to see / do:   (4 hours later: haha..)


It's about building a knowledge base in an accessible way. The contents could 
be something like the contents of the Ubuntu-Wiki. 

With accessible I mean:

1. If some information is available, people should actually find it. If it is 
not there yet, users should be able to write the question down at an 
appropriate place.

To find information, some sort of search mechanism is often used. This is fine 
for people who know how to use it, but it's often not suitable. If you don't 
know the right keywords, a fulltext search often returns too many results and 
a title search none (in a wiki). Using labels / tags (labels with type) 
certainly helps a lot to structure the content in an semi-automated way, but 
working on tag clouds is still not user friendly. 

That's why I think the structuring should be done in a wiki way as the content 
is. There could be different entry points for different kinds of users. This 
is an example of such a structure with some example questions: (of course 
this is will be splitted on many pages - on the entry page you'll only see 
the top level points.)

 / i have a problem
    / hardware doesn't work
      / it's about graphics
      / something with the network
      / da printa
      well, first off, printers suck! that said, 

    / i'm missing a program
      / graphics
        / raster (something like photoshop)  .. gimp, krita ..
       
      / presentation ("powerpoint") ...
        .. or try keyjnote. it's a small app dedicated to do exactly one thing

        how to i get my external vga port to work?
        - see: Hardware/ExternalVga

      / multimedia (sound / video)
        / play all formats
        / play mp3
        / play ogg
         about sound systems ..
        great projects: ubuntustudio / linux-audio-user

  / i want to change something in my system, but fear to do something wrong
     / updating

     / removing things
       / how to remove things properly
       / how to deactivate things
         / fonts ..
       / do i need .. ? (running services, installed packages / libraries ..)

 / i want to buy some hardware (which is supported)

 / share some recipies
   / post-install steps
   / preseed configurations
 
 / i want to know more about
   / the debian bug tracker
   / security on linux
     * cryptography basics
     * i want
       * secure web connections
       * encrypted file system
       * encrypt my emails 
     * SELinux is about ...
   / about open source / free software / and that community ..
     / it's cool. i want to get involved ...
   / random half-related things i always wanted to know:
     / why does mailman send me a reminder each month, especially with my 
password unencrypted?

 / critics
   / technical
   / social


Things can be restructured at any time. Within such a structure, a lot of cool 
things can be done when thinking further, such as:
 * allow users to "click" if some page that helped them out
 * if the problem remained unresolved, allow the user to specify what the 
problem was (impossible because of missing driver / is supposed to work but 
doesn't / too complicated / need to compile something / ...)
 * intelligent algorithms or humans can evaluate this information to improve 
the wiki structure.
 * ...

2. Aiming for complete localization
This has already been said. One point is users should feel invited to 
translate howtos etc. The more important one is: Users of other languages 
than English should not only be translators, but just write down their 
contributions in their native language. ( -> it's fine to have some 
information not available in English)

3. Provide useful information for all kinds of users with different experience 
levels
  - on the structure level (search + tags + "guided" q&a)
  - on the content level (gui kde + gui gnome + command line solutions)


Okay, this has been longer than expected...

About the question "own wiki or wiki.debian.org" I'd go for an own wiki first 
(and link to content on the debian-wiki) to allow more experiments (like the 
stuff above). Later both wikis should be merged to avoid redundancy. 

Best wishes,
Nico