Feature #18785
open
Handle oudated/unclear/wrong howto's in a decent matter.
0%
Description
This came up while seeing yet another forum post referring to howtos which are outdated, confusing or just plain wrong (). For this post I looked at the howto's available for installation on CentOS and a generic one for apache1 and only two seemed recently updated and clear about what its assumptions are and which components are used (Redmine_203_with_Subversion_and_LDAP_Authentication_(for_Redmine_and_Subversion_through_Redmine)_on_Centos_6_i386_-_detailed and Install_Redmine_25x_on_Centos_65_complete). All the others need (serious) work.
We need some way of management of the provided (installation) howtos. This can (in its simplest form) be a default type of infobox containing info about the Redmine version, used way of deployment (servers, app. servers, proxies etc.), used Rubies and their managers, etc. Ideally they could have a peer-review signature to optimize their overall quality, but such would require a lot of time.
Temporarily, we might be able to use a plain, colored table as used in Hooks_List. Some other ideas?
1 HowTo_install_Redmine_on_CentOS_5, HowTo_install_Redmine_on_CentOS_Detailed, How_to_Install_Redmine_on_CentOS_(Detailed), Redmine_on_CentOS_installation_HOWTO, RedmineAndSELinuxOnCentOS and HowTo_configure_Apache_to_run_Redmine.
Updated by Mischa The Evil almost 10 years ago
- Assignee deleted (
Jean-Philippe Lang)
Removed auto-assignment.
Updated by Jan Niggemann (redmine.org team member) almost 10 years ago
I agree that it's crucial for our users to have up to date documentation / howtos. The pages you mention haven't been updated in years and are most probably outdated (although I didn't check them).
I'd really like to know why people chose to write an new wiki page instead of editing / contributing to an existing one...
Perhaps it's because our wiki doesn't allow user interaction, curtailing the possibilities for users to discuss things. In wikipedia, if there are differing POVs, the "discussion" page is used to discuss improvements for articles. Often, a self-proclaimed "maintainer" then changes the page appropriately.
Peer review would be the very best solution, but I'm not sure that it need be difficult. Perhaps we could implement a "thumb's up = works for me" or "thumbs down = didn't work for me" gauge that, when reasonably used a couple of times, signals good / bad articles. The "usual" 5 star rating could serve the same purpose. (Would be related to #17288, #6945, #1011)
A rating mechanism, no matter of what kind, could also potentially allow us to remove / mute / expire / call-it-what-you-like old and not so good entries.
What about actually generating installation documentation? I'm not sure, but I imagine we could figure out a frontend in which a user ticks boxes / dropdowns (ruby, rails, redmine version, VCS, ...) which would then spit out a more-or-less copy&paste-able code for the user to use.
As to installation instructions: They'd probably all be obsoleted by having the latest versions of redmine packaged for the large distros, i.e. Debian, RedHat/Fedora + descendants.
Anyway, since a couple of months I monitor additions and changes to the wiki in my RSS stream and keep things clean (i.e. revert useless changes / vandalism).
We currently have 273 wiki pages, not counting non-english documentation (EsGuide, FrGuide, JaGuide, RusGuide) and the old plugin list. Focusing only on Howtos, there aren't even 100 of them.
I volunteer to clean that up, but I need some ideas / guidance on how to proceed.
Pages proposed for removal (or archival, but I'd just remove them):
Vision_Proposal
JdA
RedmineCamp
Bugmash
BugMash-10
Updated by Jan Niggemann (redmine.org team member) almost 10 years ago
Hi team, I added you as watchers to kindly ask for your feedback to my above proposal.
I'd volunteer to clean up our wiki, but need some ideas on how to proceed / how to restructure the pages.
Are you all OK with removing old and outdated content, or should I rather create an "Archive" section, to which I add those pages?
Updated by Jan from Planio www.plan.io almost 10 years ago
Jan Niggemann (redmine.org team member) wrote:
Are you all OK with removing old and outdated content, or should I rather create an "Archive" section, to which I add those pages?
As long as they don't convey misleading/wrong information, I'd keep them around for historic reasons. Moving them to some sort of "archive" sounds good to me. Also adding a bold/colored "This is outdated content" note to the top might help. For example, in the case of (my ancient initiative for a) RedmineCamp, it would help in order to prevent more people from adding their names to the list. Of course, this page could also be a candidate for deletion. I would not object.
Mischa The Evil wrote:
We need some way of management of the provided (installation) howtos. This can (in its simplest form) be a default type of infobox containing info about the Redmine version, used way of deployment (servers, app. servers, proxies etc.), used Rubies and their managers, etc.
That would be very helpful.
For outdated HowTos, we could also add a note to the top reading sth like "This HowTo seems outdated and will be deleted on 2015-xx-yy. If you would like to keep it or update it, please discuss this here: xyz". It might be a good idea to open a forum topic for each of those "questionable" HowTos and link them from the top of the wiki pages (inspired by Jan's suggestion/hint at Wikipedia's "Discuss" feature).
Updated by Jean-Philippe Lang almost 10 years ago
This sounds good for me. Moving obsolete pages to a "Archive" section with a message at the top of each page (maybe by including a wiki page that would serve as the default message) is a better option than simply deleting them.
Updated by Etienne Massip almost 10 years ago
Not sure about the Archive section but fully agree with the included page containing a coloured warning message such as "This page or section has been repeatedly reported as containing inaccurate information".