To /wiki or not to /wiki

[Karsten 'quaid' Wade]

This is the best place for this discussion ... sort of.[1]

This topic is slightly complex, I'll sort things here in to some
sections to help.

== Background ==

With MediaWiki serving www.ovirt.org, that means we will be redirecting
away from (and no longer using) wiki.ovirt.org.

MW is going to provide the top-level pages, and standard MW
configuration is to have everything appear after /wiki. It is not
impossible to change this, but it has 3 main caveats:

1. Some stuff is going to be a bit harder - we have to resolve
robots.txt and favicon.ico as not wiki articles, for example.[2]

2. We may get occasional bugs that people who use /wiki won't get.

3. mediawiki.org says, "this is not supported by the MediaWiki
developers. So if your scheme doesn't work with a new MediaWiki version,
you're on your own."

Relevant sources:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wiki_in_site_root_directory
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL/Apache

== Options ==

A. All site URLs are in the form of http://ovirt.org/wiki/Page_name

B. All site URLs are in the form of http://ovirt.org/w/Page_name

C. All site URLs are in the form of http://ovirt.org/Page_name

== My opinion ==

I like option C - I want to see clean URLs that hide implementation details.

My opinion on those concerns about upstream: that's open source. It's
hard to do anything without having problems unique or rare due to your
circumstances, getting bugs that others don't see who follow the
out-of-the-box installation, and to wonder if you won't be able to get
community support for the unusual configuration.

As it happens, we've been running MediaWiki for the last year using the
EPEL RPM -- which is not supported by the MediaWiki developers. When I
went last Fall looking for help with something, #mediawiki told me to
get rid of the RPM and use the ZIP instead, then come back for help.
(The package maintainer (smooge) has been helpful in all cases instead,
so I've been able to avoid having to go to the upstream developers for
help again.)

We have no guarantee that MediaWiki developers will support the
OpenShift quickstart. It also does not use the ZIP out-of-the-box
install, so it likely is unsupported.

My conclusion here is, personally, I have to not care that we're going
to be unsupported, since being supported is actually worse. (I'd rather
run unsupported with a good RPM than supported with an unsigned ZIP.)

Links from anywhere in the site that point to "the wiki" should point to
a landing page e.g. [[OVirt wiki]] that organizes the pages on the wiki,
exposing popular categories, etc. Thus, "the wiki" is not identified by
a specific URL, it is identified by the type of content on the page - is
it intended to be community documentation (a wiki) by it's category.

== Footnotes ==

[1] I want to acknowledge as we start that part of Garrett's expertise
that he brings to oVirt is the human-computer interface skillset. That
may not be a skill that many others of us on this list have. Are there
some folks in the rest of oVirt development we can invite to this
discussion? UI or UX folks, for example?

The reason why this matters is we want to separate our geeky-preferences
from the way things tend to work best for a broad range of humans. For
example, I love sub-domains, they work well for my brain - I'm so much
happier with lists.ovirt.org/mailman/... than www.ovirt.org/mailman...
But if Garrett told me that is not the best way to present the
information for a wide audience, I would have to give that opinion high
credence. Heck, I'm prepared to do some pretzel twists to make it
happen, based on that. (I've also always secretly loathed that MediaWiki
has the /wiki requirement.)

[2] I suspect we can special-case them in the .htaccess file.

-- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Analyst - Community Growth
http://TheOpenSourceWay.org  .^\  http://community.redhat.com
@quaid (identi.ca/twitter/IRC)  \v'  gpg: AD0E0C41

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