[IPython-dev] Wiki chaos...

[Fernando Perez]

On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Brian Granger <ellisonbg at gmail.com> wrote:

> I agree we will absolutely have misc pages that don't fit well in a
> prefix.  But the lab meetings page is not one of those (it clearly
> fits into the Dev: category).

Yup, sorry about that one, as I said, I'm pretty sure I did that :)

> There are a couple of reasons I created the prefixes:
>
> 1) In our previous wiki, there was little to no organization.  Because
> of this, people who wanted to add new content couldn't figure see
> which pages might already have content of that type and they would
> always add new pages.  This meant that we had overlapping information
> on multiple pages - and all of it grew stale.  It made the wiki
> entirely useless.
> 2) When you view a list of all our wiki pages:
>
> https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/_pages
>
> the prefixes keep pages grouped together.  We do this type of named
> based grouping all the time in our local file systems (to
> organize/sort a sequence of notebooks for a tutorial for example).  I
> don't see why wiki pages would be any different.  Is it the way I
> choose to do the prefixes? ("Foo: ")
> 2) Because there is no better way to group wiki pages together on GitHub :(

This #2 is really the main issue IMO.  I personally would much prefer
not having this kind of prefixing in names and having categorical
metadata (labels) along with a smarter wiki that would auto-create
indices.  The problem is that now, any time we make/rename/delete
pages, we also have to manually remember to go to the -Index pages and
update things.  I hate that.

But having said that, I'm pretty sure that I'm less bothered by having
prefixes than you are with not having them, therefore I'm all for a
workflow that makes you happy :)  As you mentioned in the JS doc
discussion, we really need to find practices that make our everyday
activities as smooth and pleasant as possible, given the constraints
available (in this case, the rather primitive GH wiki engine).

So I'm OK with having prefixes, and will be more careful in the future
as I make pages, I promise :)  I do worry that the index pages, being
manually maintained, will be perennially incorrect and outdated, but
I'm not sure what we can do about that.

As a show of good faith, I've just renamed the lab meeting page :)

https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/Dev:-Lab-meetings-on-Air

Cheers,

f