I looks very much like the wiki is very rarely used and only by very few ppl.
If ppl would post here and let me know why this is so I'd be very grateful.

Since you cared enough to start the thread, how about editing your post to extoll the wonders of wiki for wiki-n00bs like me

(Seriously, I've heard the term wikipedia but never an explanation of how and why it's better than The Almighty Google.)

IMHO.
The wiki isn't promoted enough. The links to wiki should be located in better places(like in audiocoding.com) because only few know that there excists a wiki.

Does this thread explain what you need to know?
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....howtopic=13040&
Let me know if I should write some more info

Thank you for posting.


Could you make some suggestions?
Right now there is a link at the frontpage to the left.

Thank you for posting.

I actually find myself referring to the HA wiki on a fairly regular basis. There's a lot of great information there for someone as relatively inexpereienced as myself...

I often consider registering for it, but comparatively speaking, I know absolutely nothing compared to 90% of the people here. I'm afraid of contributing something when obviously there's someone out there who knows more about what I'm posting, or at the very least a better way of explaining it. I assume there's some sort of validation service to make sure people are posting correct information, but then if I do submit incorrect information, I'm just bogging down the system. So, I ask myself, why bother?

That being the case, I think the wiki is a great resource, and one that I do use. I hope those who really are the experts will contribute more often.

I hope you find some of this insight at least somewhat meaningful.

Also, is there a changelog of sorts that describes what sections have recently been updated?

The idea behind a wiki is that you contribute what you know, and those who know more edit what you wrote and add more info of their own.

Look at the "History" tab of each page, or go to (EDIT) "Recent Changes".

It might be a good idea to add a link to wiki to the navigation bar now including "portal", "Forums","New Posts" etc.
TOS #15 might also be interesting. It could be something like "everybody must read wiki before posting questions and everybody must add the new information ,which was got after posting the question, to wiki." (This might be too radical)

HA wiki: http://doc.hydrogenaudio.org/wikis/hydroge...o/RecentChanges

Foobar wiki: http://doc.hydrogenaudio.org/wikis/foobar2000/RecentChanges

Both links are at the frontpage of each wiki.


Yes, I find your input useful. It explains why there are not so many contributors but not why there are nearly non recently.

I agree that if you are going to write some info you should be sure that it is correct. That being said you don't have to add much. If you read something in the wiki and get an idea for something that could be added; then please do so.

If you know the facts I don't see a problem in you adding them even if someone could do it better. It is always easier for other people to just modify your submission if they can do better. Also you can't do much harm since all submissions are saved.

And technically there's no check on the quality of the info other than me and all the users of the wiki...

Easy answer for my lack of wiki contributions: "better to keep ones mouth shut and be thought of as a fool than to open it and completely prove you are a fool" And, if I contribute "iffy" info, why make more work for some other poor soul to edit? There have been times I have been tempted to add "commentary" to portions of the wiki that are empty of content, but I refer back to my self directed quote above

I second this idea as well. I never even noticed it was on the front page until Jan told me, because I rarely use the Portal to browse HA.

[QUOTE=Mono,Feb 21 2004, 01:44 PM] [QUOTE=The idea behind a wiki is that you contribute what you know, and those who know more edit what you wrote and add more info of their own.][/QUOTE]

Ah, I understand. Well, that changes my perspective considerably.

I will definitely register then, and add my two cents wherever I can, although I am still a little concerned about posting information that is not technically "correct" and having people read through it, not knowing that it's incorrect. If the information can't be "fixed" in time, we run the risk of misinforming people, and defeating the whole purpose of the wiki

I also do agree that the link to the wiki is not in a very conspicuous location. I agree that perhaps the top of the page would be a better place for the link, or at least in such a place that it becomes a part of the standard header/footer of every page on HA, so that it is essentially accessible anywhere, anytime.

Well, i haven't had any decent knowledge about the wiki. But now i know what it is/what is it for.

Already signed in.

IMHO adding it to the portal is a good idea. You could also consider making the wiki and FAQ stand out from the rest. I also think it might be a good idea to start the FAQ with a link to the wiki and explain what a "wiki" is. I'm not so sure alot of people know that word. At least I didn't before this one was started.

Btw: Before I saw this thread I had forgotten about it...

The formatting is also annoying compared to other wikis....not once have I managed to add something and get it to show up right on the first try , whereas this isn't true of other wikis I've used.

The additional account signup makes me less likely to contribute, though I believe I understand the reasons for having it.

It is somewhat irritating that I apparently cannot use my preexisting HA nick and password in the wiki ("This member id is invalid or already in use.") even though it is clearly hosted by (and for) HA.

Coming in HA, with all the content to browse on the forum, when I had infos to post, I always had the choice between posting it directly on the forum, with everyone reading and adding comments, or going through the wiki formatting rules (italic text, titles...), how to add pictures (where to upload, how to link..), how to insert links, review the wiki words so that they are all used properly as needed in the new post, update the TOC etc...
And I usually only have the time (and not always) for the first choice.

Then, another thing that stops me is that I don't know all the content. There are many pages not linked from the main page or main TOC, so I don't know when I want to post something if it is already there, somewhere.
I don't see what is missing, what is already there, what I can add. In fact most TOC entries link to sub TOCs. And in the articles themselves, there are many links to other pages, and I don't know if these other pages are also accessible from the other subTOCs (that I don't see from the main page, but only clicking every TOC entry one by one), or if they are exclusively accessible from here.

For example, there is a page in the Wiki about Neural Networks. Just try to find it !

So there is a wiki? Where is it?

I never knew it was there. I finally found it, but it's called "knowledge base". I think more people may just not know.

I found it, but it wasn't a particularly intuitive process to locate it, so I understand exactly what you mean.

Speaking for me as a non-pro I always think of usability.
The wiki (I never looked up ANYTHING there) isn't very well in order; it's hard to find information...and most of it is rather (mh how do I say that) global.
Where is the precise information about...lets say the "core adjustments"?
This wiki is supposed to be some kind of a replacement for a HELP file, right? Therefore you need some detailed informations/descriptions of EVERY possible adjustment for non-pros.
As an example (ok, a bad one...not a wiki and not a great software ) see this. A helpful piece of manual...you find what you need even if you don't know what you're looking for.

By the way: you have my respect teetee, you had a hell of a job I guess!

Maybe it needs some kind of a moderator who reorganises the information given. Maybe it's possible to create some kind of topics and everybody can voluntarily sign up for this or that part. It's still possible to modify the results if incorrect but with that you covered all necessary questions.
Right now I don't see a great difference between the forum and the wiki (regarding the usability!).


JD

A suggestion:

Wouldn't it be a good idea if people start a thread in the forum to gather and discuss information that's supposed to get integrated into the wiki? That way everyone can contribute without fearing to submit invalid information to the wiki. Further, everybody who hasn't enough time to create a wiki entry but has knowledge to contribute can add his thoughts in the regular manner of posting to the HA forums. And people who have problems expressing themselves in english correctly could contribute easier, as they don't have to fear that they write nonsense due to language barriere etc.

If all the information in such a thread were found to be valid and complete someone with enough time can make an entry in the wiki for it.


Regards, David

Edited typos

A few thoughts more: Threads which get created for wiki stuff could be opened in the topic related forum and could simply have the term "wiki" or "for wiki" some where in the title. Antoher good thing were, that not everybody who wants to contribute must register to edit the wiki.

I just find the layout very messy and unconfortable to browse. I have no direct preferences but as a good example I think AudioCoding's wiki turns out great. Simple and easier to work on.

This wiki is too messy for me even to edit anything in.

my 5C

...because of course everybody reads the TOS before posting

I for one was put off by the complex interface... It's too hard to navigate through to find relevent information, and the layout isnt intuitive at all.

I seem to be too dumb to figure out reStructuredText. I can't find a usable link to a reStructuredText documentation. All I ever see is the goal and history of RST. Frankly, I don't care about that. *scrolls down* In that document is a link to http://mail.python.org/pipermail/doc-sig/2...une/001858.html. Aha! Yet again we have goals and history. Let's see what else is there... Ah! The specs. Those are about as easy to read as most license agreements. Lots of _:: in the titles. What's that got to do with anything? Is that text allready written in RST? Imagine reading the html specs written in html, opened in notepad. How am I supposed to know what belongs to the actual definitions and which is just markup I could ignore?

OK, we go back to the other page and start reading... Oh, right in one of the first link-filled paragraphs I get sent to Quick reStructuredText. Sounds good, I want to get started quickly!

Hm.. *emphasis* **strong emphasis**.. ok.. `interpreted text`Huh, what, a parental advisory? OK, never mind... reference_To what? What exactly is a reference anyway? If that stranger on the street makes a reference to _The Savior. Does he mean Jesus? Or Luke Skywalker? Wouldn't that only be a reference to "The"? What about spaces?

Well, I'll look at "Hyperlinks" then, hyperlinks are usefull... External hyperlinks, like Python_. .. _Python: http://www.python.org/
OK, here we go: a popular search_. .._search: http://www.google.com engine. You can search_. .._search: http://www.google.com for a lot of things_. .._things: http://howthingswork.virginia.edu/.

I guess that will make "search" clickable. Again, what about spaces? And that is supposed to be unobtrusive (a design goal).

All this morse code before and after a word confuses me. I need an idiot's guide.

Then you are in luck since I made such one:
http://doc.hydrogenaudio.org/wikis/hydroge...itingGuidelines

In this topic I tried to list all necessary topics to be covered: Wiki topics to be covered for Foobar, ...to make it a complete knowledge base

Might be a start for a reasonable help and knowledge base.

JD

offtopic: have to go to work now and I so don't want to go!

Good idea, but I would simply start threads in the topic related forum, not the wiki discussion forum, i.e. I think this thread would be more noticed and contributed to if it were in the foobar forums.


Regards, David

OK, what's a WikiWord? first link that google offers:
Camel-cased, huh. And what is it good for?


Why can't I just use a WikiWord (whatever that is). Is "AAC" really a syllable? Won't it get accepted, if I write [Welcome]. What will that link to anyway?


Does that mean I can put the "__" part anywhere on the page? Would be good for maintainance. What if I want to have more than one of those in my page?


Maybe this is all real intuitive for programmers, but not for me. A little more explanatory text bellow each example could greatly flatten the learning curve. Imo this is NOT an idiot's guide. I find it grotesque that I have to gather tiny bits of information from several web pages to start understanding what is advertised as being simple and clean. Most of the time the "answer" I find raises even more questions (see above).

My other problem is that I have difficulty putting my thoughts into English sentences, but that is secondary.

A WikiWord can be:

1) A word with more than 1 syllable where the first letter in at least 2 of the syllables are capitalized.

- BandWidth
- LossLess
- CarJacking (to find an example with more than 2 syllables)

2) Combination of 2 or more words with first letter of each word capitalized.

- RippingGuide
- OtherCodecs
- RecommendedLAME


I wrote that because the system doesn't understand that it is a WikiWord when all letters are capitalized.
You use [] to force it to make a link.
Also with a word like "Speex" there is no logical place to put 2 capitalized letters so you force a link like this:
[Speex].

But yes. The description is not accurate.




It just looks for the next "__" each time there is a reference like this. So yes you can put them anywhere as long as they are in the right order.
I think it would be good to have them after each larger paragraph though.




Ok. I am glad you took the time to be specific. I will try to add some of this info if you find it good. It is hard for me to know what people don't know. You know that when you know something quite well it becomes hard to understand why people are having trouble with it.

About it being intuitive or not: Well, I am not a programmer either but after 2 days of playing with it I was able to write that guide which shows many things that you normally don't need (not to brag. it was easier for me because I have worked with 3 other wiki systems or something like that before.) so for me it is hard to understand where it might not be intuitive to others. But as long as you or others can find the time to show where it is not good enough I will find the time to try to improve it based on your suggestions.

Thank you.

I'd have to agree. It's a bit of a pain to work on. Non-standard formatting, utterly bizarre syntax (not that I can't decypher it, but still)... Furthermore, the header sizing scheme is b0rked (Check the FAQ page of the fb2k wiki for an example; the first head-line should be one size bigger than the one right after it; I had to do it the way I did it so that there would be a clear size decrease as you went down in significance.

The one thing it has going is that it's pretty, but any useful information's at least 3 clicks deep. Click on Knowledgebase, then Wiki Directory, then HA Wiki, then you're at your choice of info. Horrible. What would be so much better would be if the Knowledgebase linked straight to the place that the "HA Wiki" link goes to presently.

Mind you, I have done a little editing/elaboration on it at times. I just don't know what more needs to be added. The FB2K wiki needs some serious work, but I don't have a lot of time for it as of late.

And the CamelCaps formatting decision sucks, IMO. It's extremely obtrusive and does not really make things any easier than just wrapping links in square brackets and working nicely.

I'm a computer science student, and the reStructuredText seems strange to me. Something about using whitespace as a formatting parameter, or allowing someone to choose one of 20 punctuation marks for a delimiter, or not making a clear distinction between markup characters and content characters, just gives me the heebie-jeebies.

The WikiWords, on the other hand, I like more than HTML links, and I'm sure I'll grow comfortable with them (assuming I spend time on the Wiki). Question: If someone changes the page name for a page, what happens to all the WikiWords? Are they automatically updated?

I'll go break the SandBox now...

Edit: yes, there really is some trickerly involved with properly formatting a Wiki entry. If anyone here wants to post some information on the Wiki but can't get over the formatting hurdle, just post your text, PM me, and I, or perhaps some other kind WikiWhiz, will labor over the implementation details.

Just for the records, as far as I'm concerned, if there is enough of a consensus that the wiki should be changed, and people are actually willing to do the work (and not just theorize or complain), then I don't have a problem with someone coming up with something new/better.

The reason the current wiki was chosen is because it fit in extremely well with Zope and Plone, which I had eventually hoped we would try and migrate more of HA over to as time went on. As it seems that so few people are interested in actually helping to make this kind of thing a reality, and I have don't have enough time or desire anymore to make it happen myself, it doesn't make much a lot of sense to hold onto this system anymore.

I'm willing to entertain ideas on a better system, and willing to provide the necessary hosting as well. However, the less integrated everything becomes, the more maintenance that means. Right now, I'm the only one doing this sort of thing, and I simply don't have much time for even this anymore... so that needs to be a serious consideration in whatever is chosen (that it needs to be very easy to maintain).

@Dibrom: Well, then, I'll see what I can do...

I'd vote for a simpler Wiki Engine, which is more classical in its Wiki approach like UseMod (OddMuse) or MoinMoin. The current environment is too complex to let the 'Wiki Dynamics' play out (read WhyWikiWorks).

dev0

Despite being somewhat annoying to use, the output looks much nicer than any other wiki I've seen, so I vote to stick with this. If it were replaced with something uglier, I'd have no incentive to work on this one instead of AudioCoding's .

yes. All Backlinks are changed too... which means you have to be careful when renaming pages.
Perhaps click the "backlink" button and check that all links makes sense with the new name.

To make the wiki more convenient (usability) I inintalized the structure of a complete FoobarManual. Hope it helps people to contribute more to the knowledgebase.

JD


/offtopic: damn, I had to learn the whole night, how to use the wiki "language" and now I won't get enough sleep!


edit: BTW ... how do I DELETE pages I created and don't need anymore? What if a simple word became a backlink and I don't want it to? I ask because in my case I had two different pages which started with the same name and I didn't realize and changed the name of one of them...ALL the backlinks changed!!!

I think you need to put an exclamation mark before the word. For example, if "ReplayGain" becomes a link and you don't want it to, then write "!ReplayGain" in the editor. It will show up as "ReplayGain" in the displayed page, but without the link.

However, the idea of WikiWords is that they link every which way, so it's easy for the user to explore something they don't recognize. In cases like "FooBar", where you might end up with 20 of the same link as you repeat the word over and over, it might make sense to disable the links. If you make a couple of referenes to "MassTagger" or "DiskWriter", though, it's ideal if you allow the WikiWords to link to the appropriate pages.

You can't delete pages on your own.
put "DeleteMe" only in the file you want deleted and I'll do it.

Thank you for the explanations, that cleared up a lot of my issues. Still missing in that explanation is what a WikiWord is actually used for. I think I've figured that part out (linkable titles?), but it would be good to be mentioned in the guide as well. How does the link target look like, how does the actual link look like.

Right now I think it works like this: create a title

========
MisterEd
========

...and later i just refer to MisterEd and this becomes a link to the above title. However I can't see this mechanism explained in the guide.

There should also be a big fat link in the "Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase Introduction" section to the getting started guide.

edit: Another important but different issue: as soon as I click on the Wiki Directory I get logged out. I stay logged in as long as I only maneuver in my personal section. I have two cookies stored on my PC according to Mozilla named "__ac" and "__ac_name".