Talk:WikiSquad/Project/Improving the Wiki

Example: When I search for a User I have to specify the namespace 'User:'. This is not intuitive for most wiki visitors. We should be able to automatically search through all namespaces.

Possible solution: I've came across this plug-in: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SearchExtraNS

I'm not 100% sure that this does what I hope for, but if it does it might be worth trying out? Note that there is a drawback "A side-effect is that the advanced search will no longer restrict results to the namespaces you select, but will always be extended to such namespace too." I'm not sure how that will effect the way we use wiki now? (Or maybe there is a setting or something that we don't even need a plug-in :þ ?) --Ilja 12/09/2017 14:14

So, I tested the extension you mention, and it did... nothing :( I also tried another extension, but it did the same thing as the previous extension (i.e. nothing) TT

I think that this extension might solve our problem eventually : https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SphinxSearch Their goal is to provide an improved search tool. However, the installation seems very long ^^'

Note that there is also this extension that is quite popular : https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CirrusSearch But of course, it is also difficult to install :D (otherwise that wouldn't be funny, isn't it ?)

I tried to install CirrusSearch on my machine, but I couldn't make it work properly... The main problem is that the installation steps are almost not documented, so when you have an issue you don't know how to solve it. I actually didn't know what I was doing when indexing the pages for the search engine, for instance :/

Ah, and also this requires the installation of an ElasticSearch server, which takes 2Gb in RAM ^^'

Aw:( there go my hopes :( Thanks for the work though :o

And I do see Sphinx is still beta. There may still be hope for the future after all :p

We must formalize naming of certain pages. We have this now for Crews and Meeting, but we can extend this for projects, topics, documentation and other events as well. Some of these already have conventions because we have standardized forms, but are not listed on this page.

We should also formalize how we want URL's to be. For example, a standard project could be:

• 'Project/Some_Project'

A project of a crew could be:

• 'Crew/An_Awesome_Crew/Project/Some_Project'

Now, what about temporary projects, such as a Linux install party ? It is by definition limited in time, and there can be several of them within a year ! Here is what we suggest:

• 'Project/Some Project/dd mm yyyy'

This date would be the start date of the project.

We could then list all projects in 'Project' or 'Projects', or redirect to the 'Category:Project'. Same goes for crews.

For the crew, because most start with the 'Crew' word, we could name them after the city where they are located. Example:

• 'Crew/Louvain-la-Neuve' for Crew BW

Note that some crews sometimes aren't located in a specific city. We could use the province for those crews. Example:

• 'Crew/Brabant wallon'

The idea is to have a general convention such as 'Something/Something specific'. See the clean URL's structure. This makes the URLs easy and readable also for people who aren't used to the wiki.

Finally, for reasons of transparency, every page should have some sort of introductionary section. We should make this a convention as well. Examples of introductionary sections are the 'Details' section on the Meeting-page (where people can give a short description of the goal of the meeting), the crews-section on the Category:Crew page and the introduction on the Category:Project page.