History:Restructure The Wiki

Restructuring the Wiki

• This page describes the first project in which the MusicBrainzWiki was cleaned up in 2004. Now it is of historical interest only.

By DonRedman:

When I first came to this wiki (early 2004) it was in a very bad shape. On the HomePage there was one big list, and there were only a few links between the pages. The list had gotten so long that it contained links to OutdatedPages and you could not find your way though it. Now things have gotten much better, a lot of pages are done in GoodWikiStyle. The wiki has become very useful and currently (Dec. 2004) much more pages are added to the wiki. The main effort to note here is RestructuringTheDocumentation, the OfficialStyleGuidelines and EditTypes. In my eyes the whole wiki is not intertwingled enough, although I hope that usage of MusicBrainzTerminology will help a lot.

Therefore

I started to do a few things. First I split the HomePage into different sections. Making a new page for each section. These pages now contain TextInsteadOfLists so that it is more explanative. most of this is finished now, but pages like EditingGuidelines still need a lot of work (see also the BigMess).

Then I made Categories. These start to be useful. See CategoriesDiscussion for more details and [http:?Category%43ategory Category­Category] for information on what a Category is.

Open Construction Sites

Currently we tackle many things at the same time. So as a reminder not to start another new project (to me and others) I list them here:

• MusicBrainzTerminology -- I try to make the intertwingling first, and hope that someone will create the pages before I need to do it :-)
• MusicBrainzDocumentation -- Not fully entered, often outdated not intertwingled at all.
• OfficialStyleGuidelines -- TarragonAllen is slowly copying these from the server.
• EditTypes -- Dupuy has started this but he seems to have stopped in mid-way.
• EditingGuidelines (still uses plural form: EditingGuidelines-- This is the remainder of the BigMess. This will probably take a while before we even know how to handle this.

I suppose that it will take us about half a year to complete all of that.

Remainders of the first restructuring

There is still a (small) BigMess left in the Moderation section. There are loads of pages that deal with Style issues, editing issues and so on. These are going to be EditingGuidelines.

We are currently (Oct 2004) copying the entire OfficialStyleGuidelines to the Wiki. the result is not clear yet, but you can find the pages through the category style.

I imagine something like this as a result.

• OfficialStyleGuideline links to all pages that describe a section of the official style each.
• OfficialStyleGuidelines has just a #REDIRECT to OfficialStyleGuideline and should eventually be deleted
• I will (one day) write an IntroductionToMusicBrainz and GeneralStylePrinciples who will both be explicitly aimed at new users, who are confused with MusicBrainz.
• I also feel that we have excessively bloated StyleGuidelines, and I hope that collaborative work on this on the Wiki will help to find the parts that are not needed (e.g. I do not understand what the first part of the BoxSetNameStyle is for)

Discussion

Is Guide Guideline or Guidelines canonical? (for ease of linking, I'd pick Guide) -- MartinRudat 11:27, 01 May 2006 (UTC)

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Author: DonRedman