[mb-style] WikiDocs for StyleGuidelines?

[Don Redman]

OK, here is a simple idea:

I have observed that people who propose _new_ guidelines or AR types  
create a wiki page and work the changes in. This makes it easy to make an  
RFV at the end. It's nothing more than: Should we make that page official?

People who want to change a guideline have a hard time doing this, since  
the page is already there and must represent the currently official view.

Now, MusicBrainz has a system in place that could solve this very  
efficiently: WikiDocs.

WikiDocs [1] means that we can 'freeze' a wiki page at a certain version.  
This version will be shown at musicbrainz.org/doc/SomePageName. People can  
still change the page on wiki.musicbrainz.org/SomePageName, but this will  
not affect the /doc/ page (we call this the "transcluded" page).
This way it is possible to have an official version under mb.org/doc/ and  
a refined draft at wiki.mb.org.

Should we do this for the OfficialStyleGuidelines? Maybe even for the AR  
documentation?


This would require:

  (1) Two or three people volunteering to observe the wiki and the style  
council so that they update the pages when needed. This is not much more  
work than staying up to date. I would explain the details of the system to  
these WikiDocsModerators.

  (2) A community effort to make the wiki pages ready for WikiDocs. This is  
a matter of a few days if a couple of active wiki editors join in. We'd  
have to
   * Move the Discussion out to /Discussion sub-pages
   * Put a standard notice on every page that makes clear where to find the  
official version, and where the draft

The offical version would look like this:  
<http://test.musicbrainz.org/doc/ReleaseArtistStyle> (note the status  
message)
The working draft would look like this:  
<http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/ReleaseArtistStyle?action=recall&rev=8> (with  
different status message). Maybe these messages could be autogenerated.

  (3) Actually we would probably find a lot of stuff that can be clarified  
on the wiki pages. So there would be some reformulating, restructuring,  
and reformating to do without _changing_ the guidelies. This would mean  
some work, but we could finally replace that dreaded  
<http://musicbrainz.org/style.html> page.

Would this be worth the work?

   DonRedman


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[1] http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/WikiDocs

-- 
Words that are written in CamelCase refer to WikiDocs,
the MusicBrainz documentation system.
Go to http://musicbrainz.org/doc/<SomeTerm>
(you might need to transform the term to singular)