Validity and Structure of Wiki Posts

[xmedeko]

I am just following the discussion from http://www.jboss.org/community/wiki/classloadingconfiguration

Shortly:

Ondrej Zizka:
Well, this is a wiki. If you think it's worth of mentioning, then mention it. The community will be grateful

Jon Stevens:
hey ondrej, given that you work for redhat, how about instead of wasting time making sarcastic useless comments, you spend some time cleaning up this inaccurate documentation.

Ondrej Zizka:
Hi Jon, the power of community is in that there is an army of people like you who can actively help others by making the wiki better. My comment was rather a suggestion/prompt than saracstic.

john thompson:
Ondrej, I wasn't exactly mentioning frustration in regards to the wiki; just jboss documentation in general. The metadata configuration files seem to be a very elusive and mysterious subject (ie. poorly documented, or maybe just difficult to find). No hard feelings toward you Ondrej! I'm sure we'd all be grateful for any additional information you can share about the different metadata configs (schemas | xsd's, locations, etc). thanks --

[xmedeko]

Well, it is a common pain of many OSS projects: development rushes forward, but documentation stays behind.

JBoss configuration changes often. It is not obvious in the Wiki (not only in the post about ClassLoading), which information is general and which is particular just to a certain JBoss version. Like Wikipedia: all posts in Wikipedia have similar structure, so it is more easy dig knowledge from Wikipedia.

I think the Role of Redhat should be to suggest a structure of the posts in the Wiki, so as it will be clear, that:

1. 
   
2. what info is general
   
3. what info is particular to a certain version or versions
   
4. what is the difference among verions
   
5. it should be clearly stated, if an author of a post is not sure if her info is general or particular to a certain version of JBoss
   
   
   Maybe it could be accomplish just by well chosen section and titles, or maybe by special tags/icons in the Wiki.

[ozizka]

Ondrej, you're right, some systemic categorization would help.

Wikipedia and JBoss wiki differs in that while the first describes objects and terms of the real world, so most of the articles are general, JBoss wiki articles' "level of generality" goes from "All JBoss products work like this" to "this is how it works for Project AB version XY".

So perhaps we should have similar categories like in JIRA. Using tags is not the best as it's shown at the bottom and rather intended to weave the related articles than to carry the meta-info.

[newtonm]

On 20th Jan 2011 we enabled categories for wiki articles at http://community.jboss.org.

Providing project teams have set these up for their spaces you can choose to associate an article with a number of <major>.<minor> releases as shown here:

http://community.jboss.org/en/jbossas?view=documents#/?tagSet=undefined

Click on the 'Filter by Categories and Tags' link in the 'Articles' widget. Categories are specific to a space whereas tags apply across spaces.