Does the Github wiki is really shit?

Community
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I tried one more time to use the wiki of github, with the aim to think about how to do a wiki for Nethserver.

My conclusion is final, it is impossible !!!

I cannot use category, it is a basic feature for a wiki, tag a page with a specific category, after you create a page which retrieves all categories. That can be done by hand, do a page and add the url in another page…but it is boring. this what I mean -> http://wiki.contribs.org/Category:Howto

I cannot create parent page, all pages are following the same order. this what I mean -> http://wiki.contribs.org/Raid:Growing and http://wiki.contribs.org/Raid

and probably much more :frowning:

this are basic features without this you cannot create a wiki for project…for a software why not , but never for a project.

When your wiki grows, it is quite impossible to manage it, Did I miss these basic features ???

What is the Plan B ?

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guy, you know… it’s the “web 2.0” approach that’s wrong…
a “classic” wiki is just like a (real) book… no one is interested in nowadays…

1 Like
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Not the best wiki in the world, but…have you tried NethServer - NethServer 6 - NethServer.org?

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I agree the GH wiki is limited. I think for content indexing and classification Sphinx/ReadTheDocs could help.

However the tool is not enough. Keeping the site structure clean and coherent requires a dedicated team of people with shared goals.

So what I really like of GH is

  • Markdown (Discourse) and RST (manuals) format support
  • Collaborative content workflow and discussions
  • New organization privileges handling, allowing better team support

And this is my vision. We’re now using 4 sites/platforms:

  • www/Wordpress
  • docs/GitHub (considering readthedocs.org as just the “docs viewer”)
  • community/Discourse
  • dev/Redmine (and GitHub also)

I think it would be good if they’ll be just 2!

  • Discourse/community (with Markdown format)
  • GitHub based:
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I tested it out recently github pages as you coming to the same conclusions, it has some limitations.
I am not saying that Github is the answer, but I’d like to make more clear our goals:

  • it has to support Markdown very well so we can copy/paste howtos born here on community or drafts extracted from posts
  • hopefully no new machine to administer, update, maintain
  • don’t fragment tools, I agree with @davidep’s vision, I don’t want yet another tool/wiki

I prefer to keep doc sources on github because the tricky “who gets to edit what?” stuff is left up to GitHub and the lovely concept of pull requests acting as an edit approval queue.

Another alternative is keeping all on github and get a viewer like jekyll
https://meta.discourse.org/t/proposing-jekyll-as-community-wiki-platform/9873/6?u=alefattorini
and this list
for example: http://docs.scala-lang.org/contribute.html

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I will take time to look all links provided here…but at the end i do love the unix way.

Do one thing but do it well.

I cannot figure how you can create a real wiki with tools which are not a wiki. The giacomo’s answer is the best given… Redmine is a wiki engine

2 Likes
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Did you ever try Gollum or Torchpad?


https://torchpad.com/
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[troll mode on]
In fact the problem that is occuring is nethesis doesn’t want to maintain and host the wiki, therefore the solution to find is not which wiki engine, but where hosts the wiki

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This is an aspect, but not the only one :wink:

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[troll mode off]

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Don’t tell us that it’s a lack of sysadmin :laughing:

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Maybe the community should raise funds to host their wiki

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In another words : Give us a lever and a place to stand, and we will move the world.

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[troll]
@stephdl you should ask SSH keys and push more RPMs to packages.nethserver.org :smile:
[/troll]

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Thanks davidep, I will answer to your invitation later, I need to think about a billion stuffs before, did I never speak about freedom and sustainable development ways.

concerning a community wiki I tried to involve the community, maybe it was to soon → Nethserver wiki Howto and I started to do some doc documentation [Stephdl Repository]

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That’s not fair @stephdl :wink:
It’s not a money problem, for me, it’s more a technical problem. We can build up, pay and maintain the host right here and right now, but I’d like to look ahead, keeping a good integration with Discourse and trying to not thrown effort away

What do you think about something like this?

Is it doable?

1 Like
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If you accept some suggestions.
The first page of our community is not the perfect way for a good immersion.

I would prefer something like this:
https://yunohost.org/#/docs_en

A page like this give a better orientation for the newcomer.

And looking yet Yunohost…They use Simone:
https://github.com/Kloadut/Simonec

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I missed the point why to use github and dokuwiki together, dokuwiki is the way to go, yes, but it can track versions alone and the backup is simple since there is no database…fetch the folder in a tar.gz each hour/day and it is done.

Why doing simple when you can do it difficult :smile:

Edit : Others have thought before me, if discourse can be used as a wiki → https://talk.hackspace.ca/t/can-we-just-use-talk-as-our-wiki-instead-of-dokuwiki/1233/2

In short : NO

Edit2 : there is no plugin to authenticate dokuwiki through discourse, time to develop one.

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Thanks for the interesting discussion, good points are explained there.
Maybe using the Github authentication could be simpler:
https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:oauth

Markdown plugin is needed too, so we can copy/paste howtos born here on community or drafts extracted from posts
This looks better supported:
https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:markdowku

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BRRRRRRR :smile: