[mb-style] WikiDocs for StyleGuidelines?

[Age Bosma]

Don Redman wrote:
> 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.
> 

> 
> Would this be worth the work?
> 


I think it will. We have the system in place so why not us it to the 
fullest. It would sure fit nicely in the current discussion on the forum 
about changing and improving the RFC/RFV process [1].

I do, however, have a few concerns:

The status of a specific page should be made _very_ clear. The current 
icon and line of text is far to easy to overlook. I suggest to put a 
nice box around the status line with a black (#3F3F3F) border and 
different background colours for each status. I don't know how many 
possible statuses we are dealing with throughout the wiki but simple 
colours like green (#99FF99) for 'official', blue (#9999FF) for 'working 
draft' and red (#FF9999) for 'deprecated' come to mind.
Can we use templates in our wiki at the moment? If yes than it shouldn't 
be hard to add or change the status of a page.

Wiki's tend to become a maze quite fast. Especially when they are used 
for documentation purposes, like in our case, it's necessary to have a 
solid structure. I already feel lost in the current wiki pages every now 
and again ;-)
To prevent the wiki from becoming a real maze, imo a set of guidelines 
(...more guidelines...) should be created providing steps to go through 
for each type of page. The same basically goes for the content structure 
which should be used for a specific page.

People should not have to knock on too many doors to get something done. 
When there's a specific group of people who are allowed to add or change 
something in the wikidocs, you don't want to have to ask them directly 
by sending them an e-mail or wait for them to come online in the IRC 
channel. Probably the best way to handle this is to add a ticket to the 
tracker in a dedicated category when a work is finished. This way the 
wiki people don't have to be active in every discussion all the time and 
they can just go through each ticket every now and again.

Yours,

Age


[1] http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?id=70