Wikimania talk:Page structure

Starting proposal

(two comments transferred from phab:T215433)

Before too many pages crowd the new Wikimania wiki, a reasonable page structure and category tree should be discussed. Looking around at different conference websites, the structure in sidebars seem to be something like:

• “Main”
  • Conference,
  • Organizers,
  • Contact,
  • Past Conferences
  • Sponsorship
• Program
• Attend
• Local Info
• Other

How would this work for the Wikimania wiki? What should be changed and in what way?

We would also have to decide on a category tree. Of course it could be changed later, but a lot of work could be saved if we had one set from the beginning. What do you think about a spontaneous proposal like the following?

• Categories collecting everything from each year’s Wikimania.
  • “Wikimania 2018”, “Wikimania 2019”, etc.
• Categories depending on what type of page it is/what it includes:
  • Presentations
  • Communications
  • Discussions
  • Keynotes
  • Lightnings
• Categories depending on what it should be used for?
  • Legacy

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Eric Luth (WMSE) (talk) Feb 6, 8:27 AM

As a general comment. We will have three active content namespace to manage

• Wikimania:/Project: mechanics of operating the wiki
• Main (ns:0) which will be enduring
• 2019: for all specific WMSE WM content; though it may have some parent components in main; or may simply be redirects to 2019:

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Billinghurst (talk) Feb 7, 2:48 AM

Before we start too many specific pages on this wiki, perhaps it's an idea to settle how the archiving should work and how to name the pages? Should we create all pages without using specific namespaces, and then let a bot archive after each year? Or create all pages below the main page within a namespace (such as 2019: or whatever?)

To clarify, should a page such as "Program" be created under "2019:Program", or "Program"? Do we use the same process with pages that are to be reusable and pages that have to be changed each year?

Eric Luth (WMSE) (talk) 11:29, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Note: I've migrated the 2 earlier comments from the project page (originally phab task) to be above your comment here.

I think I agree with Billinghurst's recommendation for how to utilize namespaces.

One of the challenges will be how to balance the effort of re-translating almost identical page content year-to-year, whilst also meeting the goal of preserving each year's history by itself. IIUC the "translation memory" system simplifies this a lot, but I'm not sure if there is a specific optimal method to minimize the effort involved for translators. E.g. The vast majority of the "hackathon" page will be identical year to year (cf. wm2017:Hackathon and wm2018:Hackathon). But enough will be unique that we want to preserve each of them (Versus just updating the same base page).

Question: Is there any better method to forking a new branch of a page, than just starting afresh with the base language page (usually English)? e.g in 2020 could we somehow duplicate the 2019:Hackathon page and all it's existing translations that then exist and simply update the minor changes in the new copy? I'm not sure.

To answer your specific questions: I think we should have the 2019 specific content immediately within the 2019: namespace, partially so that no effort is needed after the event (when attendees are usually exhausted and then are busy with all the tasks they discovered they want/need to help with!). Even the mainpage could be changed, it's just defined in MediaWiki:Mainpage which could be updated year-to-year. I guess one of the main questions is "what would even be within the root namespace (ns:0) at all?" - I.e. what would not need to change at all, year-to-year? I imagine the wm2018:Friendly space page, and a general "What is Wikimania?" faq page, but I'm not sure what else. -- Quiddity (talk) 04:09, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

So you would basically propose having everything within the 2019: namespace? Eric Luth (WMSE) (talk) 15:26, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

@Eric Luth (WMSE) and Billinghurst: Yes. Or at least everything that will change by more than 2-3 sentences each year should be immediately started within the annual namespace, rather than attempting to mass-move dozens of pages (and then leaving behind a chaotic mess of redirects which will need to be usurped). I've skimmed the per-namespace listings in Special:PrefixIndex and made a listing on this project page of the currently existing pages which should/could be moved. Quiddity (talk) 07:31, 11 March 2019 (UTC)