[IPython-dev] Wiki chaos...

[Brian Granger]

On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 3:15 PM, Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Brian Granger <ellisonbg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I agree we will absolutely have misc pages that don't fit well in a
>> prefix.  But the lab meetings page is not one of those (it clearly
>> fits into the Dev: category).
>
> Yup, sorry about that one, as I said, I'm pretty sure I did that :)

No problem, when I am in a hurry I find the prefixes annoying as well...

>> There are a couple of reasons I created the prefixes:
>>
>> 1) In our previous wiki, there was little to no organization.  Because
>> of this, people who wanted to add new content couldn't figure see
>> which pages might already have content of that type and they would
>> always add new pages.  This meant that we had overlapping information
>> on multiple pages - and all of it grew stale.  It made the wiki
>> entirely useless.
>> 2) When you view a list of all our wiki pages:
>>
>> https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/_pages
>>
>> the prefixes keep pages grouped together.  We do this type of named
>> based grouping all the time in our local file systems (to
>> organize/sort a sequence of notebooks for a tutorial for example).  I
>> don't see why wiki pages would be any different.  Is it the way I
>> choose to do the prefixes? ("Foo: ")
>> 2) Because there is no better way to group wiki pages together on GitHub :(
>
> This #2 is really the main issue IMO.  I personally would much prefer
> not having this kind of prefixing in names and having categorical
> metadata (labels) along with a smarter wiki that would auto-create
> indices.  The problem is that now, any time we make/rename/delete
> pages, we also have to manually remember to go to the -Index pages and
> update things.  I hate that.

Yep me too.  Even simple folders would be a huge upgrade for this wiki.

> But having said that, I'm pretty sure that I'm less bothered by having
> prefixes than you are with not having them, therefore I'm all for a
> workflow that makes you happy :)  As you mentioned in the JS doc
> discussion, we really need to find practices that make our everyday
> activities as smooth and pleasant as possible, given the constraints
> available (in this case, the rather primitive GH wiki engine).
>
> So I'm OK with having prefixes, and will be more careful in the future
> as I make pages, I promise :)  I do worry that the index pages, being
> manually maintained, will be perennially incorrect and outdated, but
> I'm not sure what we can do about that.
>
> As a show of good faith, I've just renamed the lab meeting page :)
>
> https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/Dev:-Lab-meetings-on-Air

Great, thanks. I am going to ad it to the Dev: Index page right now as well.

Cheers,

Brian

> Cheers,
>
> f
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--
Brian E. Granger
Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
bgranger at calpoly.edu and ellisonbg at gmail.com