I agree Karsten we should start the wiki mailing list back up again, it has not been used for quite a few months.
I think that is part of where the issue is as well. I have come across lots of pages not categorized correctly or pages not even in a categories. As I have been updating them I have made notes of which ones do not have a category.
"Karsten 'quaid' Wade" kwade@redhat.com 08/21/13 12:35 PM >>>
On 08/21/2013 09:20 AM, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
Is it just related to our instance (because of bloat we have) or it's just impossible to have working search at all? I can see some wikis that are not as bad as our is but usually it's fail to be honest...
AIUI, MediaWiki search is a bit touchy where it comes to some things, such as page names. This is why [[Natural page naming]] is preferred over [[Naming/pages/with/fake/nesting]].
In the end, our UX friends remind us that search should be a last resort if the information architecture fails. What challenges a wiki is the information architecture - getting pages in categories, putting categories as subs to other categories, having only a handful of master/top-level categories, and having pages that are obvious starting spots for certain types of content.
Take team-draft-work for example - it's hard to get it out of the stream of search results, but good categorization and maybe a "team-related material that probably isn't what you are looking for" header blocks might help. That is, put out a template for team drafts so that it makes it clear from the top of the page that it's a team draft or team-related documentation that isn't necessarily there to help users.
BTW, isn't there a wiki@ mailing list? I haven't seen anything there in a while, but it's a natural group to work with, and a good place to draw discussions in to, if we want.
- Karsten