[Koha] wiki.koha-community.org

[Thomas Dukleth]

Reply inline:

On Tue, March 9, 2010 14:29, Galen Charlton wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mar 9, 2010, at 6:57 AM, Zeno Tajoli wrote:
>> I think that wiki doesn't need multiple languages.
>
> However, there's been enough Ukrainian, French, Spanish, and Russian work
> done on the old wiki that I don't believe this to be a universally-held
> opinion.

The Koha Wiki should be a place where anyone can be comfortable
contributing to Koha in whatever language anyone may find useful.  We
should not judge everything by the standard for code development where we
need a common language to cooperate effectively on the code.

The degree of internationalisation of the Koha project is almost as
important to me as the free software aspect of the project.

The possibility of translating content should not be understood as an
obligation to translate anything between different languages.  Even having
some quite distinctive content in different languages as we have now
should be fine.

I treat internationalisation in section 2.1 further below.

[...]

>> ++ on starting from scratch.
>> A more clear organization is important.
>> But who does he plan the new organization ?
>
> I know Thomas has some ideas.

I will in due course make an organisational suggestion for categories
based on the namespaces which had been created based upon the
documentation working group led by Pierrick Le Gall at the KohaCon
Development Week in France 2006.  However, I hope that we will have a
flexible idea of categories described in section 2.2 on navigation further
below.  In future, I might correct some obvious source of confusion, such
as  defining a category in both a singular and plural form if I happen to
notice and have the time to correct something such as that but a wiki is a
wiki and should be used as such and not in an overly rigid manner.  I hope
that we will use the wiki in a manner which helps others find the content
which we add so that everyone can contribute collaboratively.

I agree with Paul Poulain that we should start over and migrate content
selectively.  See section 5 at the end for a copyright issue.  We should
preserve content from the old Koha Wiki which we do not intend to migrate.
 There is no need to delete old content merely because we do not choose to
migrate some old content to a new wiki.  Some content which may be thought
out of date or otherwise obsolete now may have no comparable up to date
equivalent and has some value which someone should still be able to use
whenever someone may choose to create an up to date equivalent for the
topic.

If we had the possibility of easily migrating all the Koha DokuWiki
content to a community controlled subdomain, then we should keep
everything in DokuWiki at the present time merely because that would be
easiest for giving attention to other things such as Koha 3.2.  However,
we lack an automatic way to migrate the current state of the Koha Dokuwiki
content perfectly without the most modest help which may not be
forthcoming from LibLime.  We could attempt to partly automate a mostly
manual process, but the scripting effort might be very significant and the
work would still be mostly manual.

I favour using the difficulty of the situation as an opportunity to
re-evaluate our choice of wiki software and how we would like to implement
it.

For those who lack sufficient time to consider proper reasoning, I present
my brief conclusion before the analysis on which it is based.  I favour
testing a good multi-lingual implementation of MediaWiki modeled largely
on the Wikipedia implementation which I expect to be the best wiki choice
for the long term future of the Koha project, especially in relation to
support for internationalisation.  While the testing is being done, I
suggest either making modest use of DokuWiki at wiki.koha-community.org or
continuing to use DokuWiki at wiki.koha.org.  I hope that we would not
rush to create a large set of new wiki pages which would then need to be
migrated from DokuWiki to MediaWiki with my expectation that MediaWiki
will be seen to be an obviously better choice for the Koha project going
forward.

I have significant experience with DokuWiki administration and modifying
some parts of the code.  I am only just starting to experiment with
MediaWiki.  I would greatly appreciate any information which those
experienced with MediaWiki can provide especially in relation to
multi-lingual support using a wiki family (farm) and multi-lingual
navigation in a manner similar to or better than Wikipedia.

In any case, we should certainly take the opportunity to adopt the
community choice of GPL 2 or later as the copyright license for newly
created wiki content in conformity with the license for Koha itself. 
Displaying notice of a GPL 2 or later license for the wiki content
requires modifying the source code of any wiki we may choose.

My reasoning and report of my experience with DokuWiki and current
investigation of MediaWiki follows.


1.  BASIC INFORMATION (FOR ANYONE WHO DOES NOT ALREADY KNOW).

DokuWiki has been designed for supporting the documentation of software
projects.  DokuWiki may have had some features which better supported
software documentation than other wikis historically.  DokuWiki has been
adopted as a wiki for a large number of software projects.

MediaWiki has been designed as the wiki for Wikipedia.  Its features have
been designed to support everything which Wikipedia needs as well as other
wiki projects of the MediaWiki foundation and Wikia.  MediaWiki is the
most widely used wiki because of the success of Wikipedia.  MediaWiki is
also the most widely adopted wiki generally and may also be the most
widely adopted wiki for software projects currently.


2.  SUITABILITY OF WIKI SOFTWARE FOR THE KOHA PROJECT.

I have examined the range of wiki software available in the past and found
that DokuWiki and MediaWiki have been the two wiki programs with the
largest number of essential and useful features.    I had found
WikiMatrix, http://www.wikimatrix.org/ , helpful to roughly compare the
features of different wiki software in the past.  DokuWiki and MediaWiki
are roughly comparable in important and useful features at least with a
suitable set of plug-ins or extensions to both.  I confine my comment to
those two wikis.

For the past few years, MediaWiki has had more features and more
extensions for additional features.  However, having more features which
we may never need nor ever use should not be the basis for choice.


2.1.  INTERNATIONALISATION.

The aspect of the Koha project which I like best after other aspects which
are also true of other free software library systems is the degree to
which Koha's development and use are international.  Any wiki for the Koha
project should support internationalisation well.

Both DokuWiki and MediaWiki have support for UTF-8 which allows characters
for any language to be used.  However, there is more to
internationalisation than mere character set support.

Other issues include the following.  Script orientation support is needed
for some languages such as right to left languages.  Translation of all
the elements of the user interface is needed to allow contribution or
receptive use without a need to understand a default user interface
language.  Navigational interoperability between languages is needed to
coordinate a common set of topics in which content may be localised in
different languages especially where some content will appear in some
languages but not be available in every language.

DokuWiki has some degree of support for 90 languages,
http://translate.dokuwiki.org/ .  A large portion of the 90 have very
little translated.  I am doubtful of the extent to which there is
provision for alternate script orientations if any.

MediaWiki has some degree of support for 324 languages,
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Localisation_statistics .  (347 languages
are listed but 23 languages by my count have no translation.)  A large
portion of the 324 have very little translated.  MediaWiki attempts to
quantitatively evaluate the quality of the translations.

MediaWiki has a much larger number of languages for which the translation
is almost complete.  Arabic for example has nearly 100% translation for
standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic for MediaWiki, but merely 48%
translation with no Egyptian Arabic translation for DokuWiki.

Given the goal of the MediaWiki Foundation to have a full Wikipedia for
every language, MediaWiki is liable to always be ahead of Koha for
language support.  The narrower scope of DokuWiki is such that it is
liable to be behind the Koha project for language support in future.

Wikipedia provides an example of a mechanism for linking to every other
language in which a wiki article appears.  Such functionality is supported
in MediaWiki using a wiki family (farm) with interwiki linking.  The
Interlanguage extension,
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Interlanguage , automatically
provides links between pages localised in different language wikis within
the wiki family.  Attempts of which I am aware to provide similar
functionality in DokuWiki in a template or plugin had failed because of
the inefficiency of checking the existence of articles in a set of
languages as part of the DokuWiki page display code.  For the Koha Wiki,
we have used language specific namespaces in DokuWiki but that method does
not allow interface localisation or different script orientations.


2.2.  NAVIGATION.

Perhaps the most difficult problem for every wiki is providing a means for
users to find the existing content treating a particular topic for reading
or to contributing to common content collaboratively.  The general wiki
expectation is that content is found using wiki links.  However, people
often create unlinked pages and then a multiplicity of pages on the same
topic exist without an efficient means of finding them.

One of the first principles of library science is grouping things together
by their similarities.  The task of similarity grouping complicated by the
fact that everything has various aspects on which similarity may be
considered and thus has a multiplicity of similarities.

DokuWiki provides namespaces which if used provide a degree of automated
navigation for traversing up and down a namespace hierarchy,
http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:wiki:namespace_tutorial .  Namespace
navigation links are displayed on each page of the Koha Wiki.  Global
navigation throughout all namespaces is provided by a sitemap,
http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?do=index .  The pageaccueil plugin,
http://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:pageaccueil , encourages consistent use of
namespaces.

Unfortunately, the DokuWiki namespace implementation is a single rigid
hierarchy based on the file system hierarchy without the benefit of
symlinks.  The Tag plugin, http://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:tag , allows
linking from a page to multiple namespaces, however, the page can only be
found within the sitemap namespace where the file is actually stored
within a directory on the filesystem.

MediaWiki has namespaces but uses more flexible categories and category
trees for navigation.  See  
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Categories and
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:CategoryTree/Top_level .  Category
links appear at the bottom of Wikipedia pages.  The CategoryBreadcrumb
extension, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CategoryBreadcrumb ,
displays category hierarchies in each page for navigation to any part of
the hierarchy.

The advantage of categories as used in MediaWiki over namespaces as used
in DokuWiki is that they are not rigid hierarchies and any page can be
included in multiple categories.  The disadvantage of categories is that
they are not assigned automatically by contextual default.  Categories
rely to a greater degree than namespaces upon the effort of contributors
to assign them.  The SelectCategory extension,
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SelectCategory ,  encourages
category assignment and assists users in assigning categories
consistently.  The Semantic MediaWiki extension,
http://semantic-mediawiki.org/ , and associated extensions could be used
to provide some automated contextual assignment of relationships.


2.3.  WIKI READABILITY.

Content is created to be read and used.  The easier it is to optically
read and follow text, the more attention a reader's brain can give to the
meaning of content.  My observations in this subsection may be entirely
lost on those who may notice little difference between the eye / brain
effort required to read a traditional printed book in comparison to the
effort required to read the same text on common contemporary computer
displays.  The possibility that we can become accustomed to working in
adverse conditions is not an argument against improving our conditions.

DokuWiki page design and CSS pleases some aesthetic sense to avoid dark
characters, ragged right edges, and maximise use of screen space.  In
attempting to satisfy an aesthetic choice, readability is compromised
generally and in some special circumstances.

DokuWiki low contrast between the background and text impairs readability.
 I have no claim that the content is actually unreadable, but merely that
readability is impaired.  The low contrast problem is worst in the page
table of contents which uses an especially small font with a similar light
weight to the unusually light weight external links.

DokuWiki placement of the table of contents to the right of the initial
part of the page text can create an overlap problem with page text in
Mozilla based browsers, such as Firefox.  Fully displayed URLs are part of
good practise for some bibliographic styles.  Mozilla based browsers never
wrap long text strings to the next line which can result in unreadable
overlapping content in some cases which is especially likely for long
URLs.  I used an image placeholder as a workaround to avoid long URLs
overlapping the table of contents for a version of a bibliography which I
contributed to the Koha Wiki, 
http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:standards:cataloguing_classification:bibliography
.

DokuWiki uses the full width of the screen to present content with almost
no constraint on line width.  Most of the content in the Koha Wiki is
presented in list form for which line length imposes few problems. 
Scanning from one line to the next smoothly for material presented in full
paragraphs becomes a difficulty when lines are unusually wide relative to
their height as can now be the case with contemporary wide high resolution
displays.  Having reasonable line width constraints from margins or other
page elements avoids the user needing to adjust his web browser window
width to read DokuWiki content more easily.  Almost no one is liable to
actually adjust his web browser window width for a DokuWiki website when
most web pages constrain line width with navigation or advertising
columns.  There is very little content in the Koha Wiki which uses full
paragraphs in the manner which is the common style in Wikipedia but I have
been a little discouraged from contributing such content to the Koha Wiki
myself in the past with the knowledge that reading such content is
unnecessarily difficult in DokuWiki.

DokuWiki blind right justification of text occasionally results in a line
of text with almost no words each of which is separated by a very large
white space.  This occasional effect breaks the flow of reading and undoes
any advantages of right justification on readability.  Right justification
is not appropriate for web publication with no control over the absolute
window width and font size displayed to the user.  The appropriate
situation for right justification applied with an understanding of
whitespace problems is limited to traditional print material and
electronic file formats designed to reproduce the exact appearance of
printed material, such as the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format.

Most of the DokuWiki readability problems can be fixed by modifying the
DokuWiki CSS.  I have maintained such a modified DokuWiki CSS for my own
use from 2006.

The MediaWiki monobook skin uses CSS based on the highly regarded Plone
CSS.  Significant work has gone into ensuring that the default Plone CSS
has good cross-browser support and readability.  Plone CSS and the
MediaWiki monobook adaptation are not perfect but they have at least given
attention to the issues where DokuWiki has not.

[It is always possible to modify the default Plone CSS in a manner which
breaks its cross-browser and good readability features.  The untested new
Plone based Koha website demonstrated that fact in May.  One section had
display problems in every web browser and  the main navigation links were
not visible when using default Internet Explorer settings.]


2.4.  WIKI SYNTAX.

There are some differences in wiki markup syntax and what the syntax
supports between DokuWiki and MediaWiki,
http://www.wikimatrix.org/syntax.php .  While there is much in common
between their respective wiki syntaxes, the differences mean that
formatted content cannot necessarily be copied between a DokuWiki and a
MediaWiki installation and expected to work correctly.  There are no
sufficiently debugged conversion scripts which I have been able to find,
although, I would experiment with creating a very simple conversion script
which may be sufficient for most existing Koha Wiki pages.

DokuWiki has been considered to have a syntax with the greatest
differences to other wiki syntaxes.  My favourite DokuWiki syntax feature
is the provision for 5 levels of section headings.  However, I may be the
only contributor to the Koha Wiki who has ever used all 5 levels of
headings.

MediaWiki as the wiki from the Wikipedia project has the wiki syntax which
is most familiar to the largest number of people.  I am disappointed that
MediaWiki only supports 3 levels of section headings.

My own particular concern about the number of levels of MediaWiki section
headings could be addressed by either flattening some of the section
shierarchies in a few of the pages which I have contributed or breaking
some subsections into different linked wiki pages.


2.5.  SOFTWARE PROJECT INTEGRATION.

DokuWiki and MediaWiki support some functionality to integrate the wiki
with other parts of a software project.

DokuWiki provides syntax highlighting of example source code using the
<code> tag.  Some additional plugins extend the syntax highlighting.  The
gitlink2 plugin allows the use of git commit hashes to link to source
code.

MediaWiki has source code syntax highlighting extensions such as
GeSHiHilight, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GeSHiHighlight .

The BugzillaReports extension,
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Bugzilla_Reports , provides views
on the state of bugs in Bugzilla.  A link to a bugzilla query would
probably be easier.

The BugSquish extension allows interwiki links to BugZilla which display
the status of a bug.  However, intuitive use is complicated by the need to
avoid using 'bug' as an interwiki link prefix because the 'bug' prefix is
reserved for the  Buginese language.


2.6.  SCALABILTY AND COMPLEXITY.

Frederic Demians is correct in identifying that DokuWiki is much lighter
weight than MediaWiki in terms of system resources and administrative
complexity.  Some increase in complexity is generally required to support
a larger feature set.  A useful question is whether greater complexity is
manageable and scalable.

DokuWiki has some efficiency problems which prevent use in a coordinated
family of fully localised wikis because of  limitations of the file system
based design which helps provide simplicity.  The simplicity has a
corresponding disadvantage for scalability.

Wikipedia has proven that MediaWiki is  scalable as one of the busiest
websites on the internet.  MediaWiki would provide more than enough
scalability for future needs of the Koha project.  As the most widely
adopted wiki, there is no shortage of experienced people who may be able
to answer a question about MediaWiki administration.


3.  DOKUWIKI MODIFICATION.

I have been privately maintaining a modified installation of DokuWiki
which corrects many of the DokuWiki problems which I have found in the
Koha Wiki installation.  From 2006, I have maintained my own modified
version of the monobook template,
http://www.dokuwiki.org/template:monobook .  Monobook is designed to
emulate some features of MediaWiki.  See the current maintainer's site,
http://readm3.org/ , and also http://www.pkuinfo.it/ for examples of
DokuWiki using the Monobook template.

My modifications more closely follow the CSS used in the MediaWiki
monobook skin.  I also fixed several bugs for Internet Explorer and other
web browsers.  Additionally, I modified some core DokuWiki page display
code to better support navigation elements.

I had been working with Joshua Ferraro to test my DokuWiki modifications
in 2006.  At the stage when they seemed to please him and they should have
then been put forward for a community vote, he suddenly lost time to give
any attention to them.  He had mistakenly suspected an authentication bug
in testing where no authentication code had been touched.  Stephen Hedges
was intending to propose to take the time to migrate the Koha Wiki content
to MediaWiki later that year before he obtained a different job which did
not grant him sufficient time for Koha.

I am pleased to see that the Monobook template has a new maintainer after
being abandoned by its author for a long period.  However, when the best
corrections to DokuWiki problems are to model the design more closely on
MediaWiki, then using MediaWiki itself instead of a partial implementation
is liable to be a better solution.


4.  MEDIAWIKI TESTING.

I am working on preparing a test MediaWiki installation following the
interlinked languages wiki family example of Wikipedia.  The suggestion of
the designated easiest method from the wiki family discussion page,
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual_talk:Wiki_family#Easiest_way , seems
better than attempting to follow any of the other incompletely documented
methods from the main wiki family page,
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wiki_family.  Even the particular
method used by Wikipedia itself is very incompletely documented and
perhaps unnecessarily difficult to maintain.

Wikipedia runs from the current MediaWiki code from the MediaWiki
Subversion source code repository which is maintained as stable for their
own use.  Using the latest MediaWiki code from the Subversion repository
would seem unwise for the Koha project without the resources to devote to
maintaining the wiki code when Koha is the Koha project software, not
MediaWiki.

I am experimenting with the latest stable release version 1.15.1. 
Supporting the general functionality of Wikipedia using the extensions
installed for Wikipedia seems important,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version .  Some functionality which
may only be available in extensions for version 1.15 may have been
integrated into the core in Subversion and the corresponding extensions
would need to be discovered if there are any.

I also think that adding some of the additional extensions mentioned above
for navigation as well as others is important.  Some extensions such as
Semantic MediaWiki might never actually be used but that would be no
reason not to make them available if some people may have an interest in
trying to make use of them.

As stated above, I would appreciate any information which others may have
to offer for my effort to test MediaWiki, especially as I lack experience
with MediaWiki administration and have other commitments for most all of
my time.


5.  NEW WIKI NEW CONTENT LICENSE.

We have held a vote of significant past wiki contributors about adopting a
new license of GPL 2 or later for wiki content,
http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=relicensing .  Any new wiki should have
our content license choice which requires a minor change to the source
code to display.  An appropriate plugin or extension might also be used to
display a GPL 2 or later license.

Until we have a vote from some who have yet to vote, we should take a
little care to not copy some content from the old wiki which those who
have not voted had contributed.  Rewriting such problematic content should
be relatively easy.  A few of the most important pages in the wiki fall
into that category.  I would prefer that we rewrite such problematic
content instead of marking it as being under the old license.  I hope that
everyone who has contributed to the old wiki and is still doing something
with Koha will eventually make their vote on the question clear.


Thomas Dukleth
Agogme
109 E 9th Street, 3D
New York, NY  10003
USA
http://www.agogme.com
+1 212-674-3783


[...]