Dekiwiki blocking Polish MDC localization.

What would make MDC easier for you to use?

Back to MediaWiki? :p

* As far as improving MDC content goes, I think that it’s actually mostly a social issue rather than a technological one: contributors or outstanding articles are never recognized, for instance. Wikipedia features like “Featured Articles” and more social ones like Barnstars could be really nice here, as well as adding things to the front page that make MDC feel more like a community and less like a static documentation resource like MSDN could go a long way. Adding metrics information that makes it easier for others to figure out where they can contribute to make the biggest difference would also be awesome, e.g. a list of most-requested-for articles or most-linked-to articles that don’t exist yet.

* A very simple “fallback” for the blank nsI* pages would be to automatically insert the IDL file for the interface from MXR in the page. In fact, providing a link to this even if there is content in the page would be really useful, because it’s a manual task I almost always have to do, and that newcomers who don’t know about MXR would be completely lost without.

* To make it easier for others to contribute to making MDC easier to use, it might be nice to highlight a “MDC Addons” page or something, if one doesn’t already exist, which could contain Jetpacks/Addons/GreaseMonkey scripts that add cool functionality.

-Create a list of the articles that are most in need of being translated for each language (sorted by hits).
-Display the progress made by each localization team.
-Compare article’s modification date against the modification date of the original English article and mark old articles.

-Improve the search engine.
-Readers should have the ability to rate articles to improve quality.
-Mark not existing talk pages (red link color).

Regards.

1a. How do I find which pages have embedded code in them, or which include complete samples? E.g. NSPR_API_Reference/Introduction_to_NSPR#NSPR_Sample_Code says it presents two samples, but I couldn’t find them.
1b. Template:Embed_text should add the page to Category:Embedded files”, or if you specify a language for syntax highlighting, the subcategory:Embedded code snippets /javascript.
1c. What’s an example of an area where the sample code is integrated approaching the way I described?
1d. I guess I’m not explaining my vision in an inspiring way. Take say https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS3_Columns . It presents CSS code snippets, then repeats them inline so you can see the effect. This is prone to error (two copies to keep in sync, one full of HTML escapes), and non-interactive. Imagine if the CSS was in a textarea or Bespin and you could modify it and immediately see the sample text change. Imagine similar for JavaScript, XUL, canvas. SVG…

2. Source code: Ahh, I see various Template:Source*, I’ve never noticed them browsing MDC. There should be one template for source that generates links to all of hg/lxr/mxr/DXR David-Humphrey-wonder-tool.

3. I’m confused, do you use doc generation tools at all? If you do, how do you keep MDC and Mozilla source in sync?
3a. If you do use doc tools, DevMo pages should indicate when parts of them were generated from source code.

In writing this, I was stymied trying to find examples of these facilities in MDC. Is there a way to see what pages use a template? “Pages that link to Template:Source” or Template:Embed_text” doesn’t seem to show which pages invoke a template.

The MDC Help link takes you to a page with an “Editing content” section, but that doesn’t link to How to Help or Getting Started (which are very useful!).

Next time you ask for suggestions, you should link to “Why MDC uses MindTouch” and any other vision documents to encourage better (or less ) debate.

I’m sorry this is an incoherent mix of glitches, questions, and big picture. Your blog software wouldn’t let me link to MDC pages, it accused me of being “a bit spammy”.

Regards.


<li><a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=515190" title="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=515190" class="external">Bug 515190</a> - <span class="bz_default_hidden" id="summary_alias_container" style="display: inline;"><span id="short_desc_nonedit_display">Hashchange event should be dispatched synchronously</span></span></li>

(I hope that came out right…)

1. Working on ways to get devmo available offline; I have no idea when or how that’ll be done yet. There is infrastructure there to export articles to PDF though, which is a start at least.

2. Yes, the API is available and can be used to do a lot of very cool stuff.

skierpage:

The sample code is static the way it is because of leftovers from MediaWiki. We’re using more and more dynamic samples as time goes by. This isn’t a matter of features for the wiki software, but how we’re using it. There simply aren’t enough people contributing new samples right now.

We already have links to the source code for stuff; if you see places where links should be but aren’t, add them.

We don’t automatically generate any of our documentation at this time. Auto-documentation tools aren’t adequate for the quality we want to achieve, especially given that we can’t freely edit the comments in the code without going through the same checkin process that true code changes require. That, too, has nothing to do with the wiki software itself.

The “function InterWiki failed” errors are easy to fix, someone just needs to work on it. They’re a result of an error converting from MediaWiki. All that needs to be done to fix them is to replace “mediawiki.interwiki” with “interwiki” everywhere they occur. This is a time-consuming job that I don’t have time for; anyone that sees this error should fix it. I do when I spot them while working on other things.

The search and tag pages showing stuff in the wrong languages is an annoying bug and I keep hassling the MindTouch guys about it. I will continue to do so.

Let me be clear: we will NOT be changing back to MediaWiki, and every time someone brings up the idea, I die a little inside. Please stop.