Breathing life back into www.mozilla.org
fantasai
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=345664
Chris Ilias suggested pulling the discussion out into the newsgroups. As David Baron
points out in
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=345664#c52
there are really two discussions happening here: what www.mozilla.org should become, and
what to do with all the docs on www.mozilla.org that don't support that vision.
Therefore I'm splitting the discussion. This thread is for www.mozilla.org's mission
statement and way forward. Go to the previous thread to argue about dealing with old
content.
KaiRo writes:
> I think what we probably really need is
> 1) a real vision what www.m.o actually is for and what is actually should
> contain, and
> 2) a module owner for www.m.o who stands behind that vision and happily will
> review all changes that leads towards that vision.
The bug discussion on this is comment #0 up to comment #20, plus comments #29-34 and
maybe #51 and #53.
Dria has provided an overview of content on www.mozilla.org at
http://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Dria/Mozilla.org_Site_Structure
My take from the discussion so far is mostly in comment 19:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=345664#c19
Reproduced here with minor updates from later discussion:
Wrt Direction
-------------
Beltzner writes:
IMO, the goal should be for mozilla.org to be the page where you go to
learn more about getting involved in the Mozilla project which includes
any Mozilla subproject.
I think this is a good mission statement.
KaiRo writes:
In my eyes, mozilla.org should be the place to go if one wants to know
more about the Mozilla project and/or community. This includes getting
involved, learning how the project itself is organized, how to get in
touch with the community, what subprojects we have, maybe even what the
Mozilla platform is and where it's headed - and linking all our various
resources so that one can easily find them.
A good restatement, with a list of subgoals for us. :)
fantasai writes:
David Boswell writes:
> If we decide that the function of www.mozilla.org is to serve as an
> entry point for the whole of the Mozilla community, that would lead
> to a different outcome for a given page than if we decide the site
> should exist to provide the context for the rest of the community.
It should do both.
Wrt Project Pages
-----------------
Reed writes:
* Small/new/etc. projects should be moved to a new projects.mozilla.org site
* More mature projects should be moved to separate domains
(caminobrowser.org, for example); hosted by MoFo hopefully
Beltzner writes:
Who decides what's small/new? And what value is obtained from this
segmentation? I'd rather have a list of all projects, put the "big"
(ie: famous in terms of queries or google searches) ones in a section
at the top, but still make mozilla.org the home for all mozilla related
projects. Heck, I'd even have pages for mozilla.org/songbird which talk
about mozilla-derivative projects.
Hecker writes:
I think projects like Camino, Seamonkey, Sunbird, etc., having their own
independent domains is overall a good idea -- I think it gives those
projects a sense of identity and of not just being part of the
mozilla.org "grab bag". This is healthy IMO.
KaiRo writes:
IMHO, the project owners/leaders should decide theirselves if they want
to have their own domain for their project or not. All projects should
have some default space though where they can place some basic
information about their project, e.g. projects.mozilla.org/<projectname>/
- this can be used as long as the project itself thinks it's enough to
stick their content there. If and when the project wants to move to using
their own site/domain, we might even redirect this default space to their
new site.
fantasai writes:
I agree with Beltzner here. I think projects like Seamonkey and Camino
starting up their own domains is a good idea -- but I think those new
domains should be an end-user front, just like mozilla.com is for FF/TB.
Our projects aren't a "grab bag". mozilla.org is not SourceForge, we're
not cvs+bugzilla hosting. Our software are all interrelated: tied together
deep throughout the source code. You can't build any of them without Gecko.
This makes the source code, schedules, documentation, and communities all
overlap. Significantly. There's more overlap than not. The subprojects are
all part of the Mozilla Project, and should identify themselves as such.
Hecker responds:
I'm personally happy with this approach: List all projects under
www.mozilla.org and provide for each the sorts of information appropriate for
w.m.o (as discussed [below]), and then have optional separate domains containing
end user information, for any projects that want to do that.
www vs wiki vs projects
-----------------------
Axel writes:
1) When do I put project pages on wiki.m.o, and when on www.m.o?
I would think that this is something that can be decided depending on
editing frequency and scale of cooperative editing. Maybe personal taste,
too.
2) Where do I put project pages on wiki.m.o and on www.m.o?
Looking at the QA and Project pages for Firefox2, those are at
completely different hierarchies, some use / for separation, some use :.
If you want to enter a URL, you need to know which, if you want to
navigate to it, you need to know the right entry point.
fantasai writes:
I personally find this very confusing, but I don't really know what to
do about it...
I think we can start improving the situation by having all the projects
choose one (1) of either their wiki site Home_Page or their www site
index.html as their main entry page page. They should sort out their main
page content based on that decision, and we should update (revamp)
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/, have it point to the right main pages,
and link to it prominently from the front page.
Simon 'sipaq' Paquet started on this:
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.mozilla-org/browse_frm/thread/6f57629383cab883
(Note that the above is not as accurate a reproduction of the discussion as
the snippets in my last posting, it merely reflects my understanding of the
current state of the discussion.)
~fantasai
Myk Melez
> www vs wiki vs projects
> -----------------------
>
> Axel writes:
> 1) When do I put project pages on wiki.m.o, and when on www.m.o?
> I would think that this is something that can be decided depending on
> editing frequency and scale of cooperative editing. Maybe personal taste,
> too.
What about merging the two, migrating www content to the wiki and then
pointing www.mozilla.org at it? It seems unnecessarily costly and
confusing, both for community members and potential contributors, to
have both sites.
-myk
fantasai
There is tons of content on www.mozilla.org and migrating most of it would
be useless. Also, wiki.mozilla.org is very Mozilla developer-centric (and
it ought to stay that way). We need an entry to the entire project, which
is something that www.mozilla.org can provide.
For project pages, migrating them to the wiki might be a good idea but I'd
rather have the project decide on that and do the work than assign a team
to force the move. For now revamping the Projects page to point to the
appropriate location is fine, and I'm happy with Simon filing a bug and
doing that based on the feedback he received in March.
~fantasai
Myk Melez
> There is tons of content on www.mozilla.org and migrating most of it would
> be useless.
Right. I'm not suggesting we migrate most of that content. We should
instead archive it somewhere like www-obsolete.mozilla.org.
> Also, wiki.mozilla.org is very Mozilla developer-centric (and
> it ought to stay that way). We need an entry to the entire project, which
> is something that www.mozilla.org can provide.
I agree that www.mozilla.org should be the entry to the entire project,
I just think that it'd make sense for that site's content to be managed
by a wiki, and if it was managed by a wiki, then I don't see why we
should have a separate wiki specifically for developer-oriented project
information.
-myk
Smokey Ardisson
> Myk Melez wrote:
>
> > What about merging the two, migrating www content to the wiki and then
> > confusing, both for community members and potential contributors, to
> > have both sites.
>
> be useless. Also, wiki.mozilla.org is very Mozilla developer-centric (and
> it ought to stay that way). We need an entry to the entire project, which
> is something thatwww.mozilla.orgcan provide.
There is a lot of content (or, perhaps, there should be a fair amount
of content) that should be on mozilla.org that is not appropriate for
a wiki.
* Policy documents large and small (this has been touched on
in .governance several times in the last few months), e.g. /
owners.html, /legal/eula/, hacking/reviewers.html, /projects/firefox/
review.html, /projects/toolkit/review.html, and much, much more
* Press Releases and other press-related information
* Overviews of the project structure (/foundation/, /about/, probably
other stuff; it's a mess, for sure)
* /security/
* Items of historical interest (e.g., but not limited to, /party/)
What a number of the proposals I've been hearing seem to envision is
www.mozilla.org as an empty shell. I think this is the wrong way to
go. www.mozilla.org speaks with authority about the project; for the
types of things above, wikis do not speak with authority to most
people. Moreover, we also need a good, single place that integrates
all of our other sites with useful content: wiki.mo, MDC (why is there
developer documentation on both MDC and wiki.mo, as well as www.mo!),
planet.mo, and "application sites" like www.mozilla.com, SUMO,
caminobrowser.org
And, as far as archiving old content goes (whatever we end up deciding
"old" is), why even bother moving it somewhere? Why not simply remove
links pointing to this content from pages we're "keeping" (not hard,
in some cases, since a lot of the content is hard to find) and create
a new page at www.mozilla.org/archive.html that then lists the
content. This removes this content from public view (where such
content was actually findable before) but continues to make it
accessible, and it doesn't break any bookmarks that people like dbaron
have (and by no means should we think dbaron is an isolated case).
Perhaps even add a "badge" noting this content is considered archival,
historical information?
By way of summary, www.mozilla.org should be the central site for the
Mozilla community and for anyone wanting to find out about the
project. It should speak with authority for the project about its
policies, its goals and intentions (foundation, about), its activities
(press), and where the project has been (historical interest and
archived stuff), and it should help all visitors find their way to
whatever other resources they need.
Smokey
Dan Mosedale
>
> I agree that www.mozilla.org should be the entry to the entire project,
> I just think that it'd make sense for that site's content to be managed
> by a wiki,
I tend to agree with this. I suspect that the lower barrier to editing
is one of the reasons that MDC is able to kept more up-to-date than
www.mozilla.org ever was. Note that this would make it harder to
include HTML generated from other sources, though (c.f. the old
discussion about getting the doxygen HTML onto MDC).
> and if it was managed by a wiki, then I don't see why we
> should have a separate wiki specifically for developer-oriented project
> information.
One reason might be in order to have one area that is a bit more
"managed" and kept up-to-date (a la MDC) and one area that's really more
of a scratchpad (a la the current wiki.mozilla.org).
Dan
davidwboswell
> more about the Mozilla project and/or community. This includes getting
> involved, learning how the project itself is organized, how to get in
> touch with the community, what subprojects we have, maybe even what the
> Mozilla platform is and where it's headed - and linking all our various
> resources so that one can easily find them.
I think this is certainly a reasonable vision for the site, but I
would suggest adding one more part that helps gives us direction for
determining what content belongs on www.mozilla.org and what content
should be linked to on another site. How about:
"The www.mozilla.org site should contain content that is relevant to
the whole community and not just to one segment."
This statement is already implied by the fact that developer docs are
being migrated to MDC, but I think it would be useful to state this
explicitly. There is a lot of content that applies to developers,
evangelists, users and others and that certainly belongs in an easy to
find central location. For content that applies to just one of those
groups, there is probably already a site dedicated to that area that
we can link to (and migrate content to as needed).
In this sense, www.mozilla.org is an entry point for all of the sites
in the community, but it isn't an empty shell because there is still
some content that belongs on the site.
Frank Hecker
> Myk Melez wrote:
>>
>> I agree that www.mozilla.org should be the entry to the entire
>> project, I just think that it'd make sense for that site's content to
>> be managed by a wiki,
>
> I tend to agree with this. I suspect that the lower barrier to editing
> is one of the reasons that MDC is able to kept more up-to-date than
> www.mozilla.org ever was.
I think there are two separate issues here, ease of updating the site
and editability by the general public. In my mind www.mozilla.org,
unlike wiki.mozilla.org, is a source of *official* Mozilla project
information, and a very large proportion of the site's content, if not
all of it, should be off-limits to casual changes; this includes, for
example, project policy documents, Foundation public documents (Form
990s, financial statements, etc.), the CA certificate data, and so on.
If something is non-official information then IMO it should be moved to
some other site (or deleted, if it's obsolete).
So to my mind the only reason for converting www.mozilla.org to a wiki
would be to enable easier updating of official Mozilla project
information by a defined group of people designated to update such
information. I'd prefer to first figure out what should go on
www.mozilla.org and who should be responsible for maintaining it. Then
we can figure out if a wiki is the best approach to enabling those
people to do those tasks, or if maintaining the status quo (i.e., using
CVS) is OK for at least the near term.
Frank
--
Frank Hecker
fantasai
For people who have CVS access, editing pages in the current system isn't
much harder than editing a wiki. The cvs interface is available, but we also
have Doctor for editing through a web interface. The main advantage a wiki
has is that anyone can edit, but for official documents you don't want that.
~fantasai
Dan Mosedale
> In my mind www.mozilla.org,
> unlike wiki.mozilla.org, is a source of *official* Mozilla project
> information, and a very large proportion of the site's content, if not
> all of it, should be off-limits to casual changes; this includes, for
> example, project policy documents, Foundation public documents (Form
> 990s, financial statements, etc.), the CA certificate data, and so on.
> If something is non-official information then IMO it should be moved to
> some other site (or deleted, if it's obsolete).
I guess I was conceiving of www.mozilla.org as it's been in the past, as
both a source of official and unofficial information. However, making it
be an official-only source sounds like a good idea to me; it seems much
more likely to be what newbies to the Mozilla sphere are going to expect
anyway.
Given that, your and fantasai's subsequent points seem right on the
money. In deciding whether a wiki or the existing setup makes more
sense, it's worth keeping in mind that wiki pages can be locked down to
prevent editing by non-authorized users.
Dan
fantasai
>
> I guess I was conceiving of www.mozilla.org as it's been in the past, as
> both a source of official and unofficial information. However, making it
> be an official-only source sounds like a good idea to me; it seems much
> more likely to be what newbies to the Mozilla sphere are going to expect
> anyway.
>
> Given that, your and fantasai's subsequent points seem right on the
> money. In deciding whether a wiki or the existing setup makes more
> sense, it's worth keeping in mind that wiki pages can be locked down to
> prevent editing by non-authorized users.
Yeah, but I don't see how using a wiki would gain us anything in this
case. Like I said, authorized users already have a web-based editing
interface on www.mozilla.org. Switching to a wiki would involve a lot
of extra work and further complicate handling of existing pages on
www.mozilla.org, many of which need to remain outside the templating
system.
~fantasai
Robert Kaiser
> Myk Melez wrote:
>>
>> I agree that www.mozilla.org should be the entry to the entire
>> project, I just think that it'd make sense for that site's content to
>> be managed by a wiki,
>
> I tend to agree with this. I suspect that the lower barrier to editing
> is one of the reasons that MDC is able to kept more up-to-date than
> www.mozilla.org ever was.
I actually think one main reason why MDC is in much better shape than
www.m.o ever was is that it has a dedicated manager and a team actually
caring about it (isn't someone even paid full-time to work on MDC?),
another reason is that MDC has a clear focus on documentation, while
www.m.o never had such a focus.
Both things have nothing to do with wiki or non-wiki, and the CVS-based
nature of www.m.o along with doctor makes it not as hard to edit as one
might think, just that not everyone can edit it, which is a good thing
in many people's eyes for the kind of content that is supposed to live
there (opposed to documentations which MDC is for or dev scratchpads
which should be on wikimo).
Robert Kaiser
Robert Kaiser
> "The www.mozilla.org site should contain content that is relevant to
> the whole community and not just to one segment."
So, any project pages would be excluded by definition? MoFo financial
statements that are probably irrelevant to most contributors (as long as
they are positive) don't belong there?
Press releases of the Foundation that are about only one segment of what
our community does are irrelevant?
I think a definition that is based on official vs. unofficial or that
specifically defines what belongs where else (e.g. documentation -> MDC,
dev scratchpads -> wikimo, ...) may be actually better than your above...
Robert Kaiser
davidwboswell
> > the whole community and not just to one segment."
>
> So, any project pages would be excluded by definition?
Based on earlier discussions summarized at the top of this thread, it
sounds like listing all projects on www.mozilla.org makes sense but
that in the long-term it would be a goal to host the project pages
themselves somewhere else (either on independent domains, on wiki.m.o
or on a projects.m.o site).
> MoFo financial
> statements that are probably irrelevant to most contributors (as long as
> they are positive) don't belong there?
> Press releases of the Foundation that are about only one segment of what
> our community does are irrelevant?
Although the financial statements themselves probably don't appeal to
a wide audience, I think the Foundation content as a whole certainly
is relevant to the entire community.
> I think a definition that is based on official vs. unofficial or that
> specifically defines what belongs where else (e.g. documentation -> MDC,
> dev scratchpads -> wikimo, ...) may be actually better than your above...
I think coming up with a better definition would be great as long as
it provides guidance about when a page should be on www.mozilla.org
and when it shouldn't be. Using the terms 'official' and 'unofficial'
could be problematic though because it still doesn't address where
content belongs. Isn't there official content on mozilla.com, MDC,
SUMO, QMO...?
I understand though that saying 'content that is relevant to the whole
community' is still vague and could be made more precise. To clarify,
I think the following content applies to the whole community:
- About content
- Foundation content
- Project lists and community links
- Community guidelines
- Legal and policy content
davidwboswell
try to get the discussion about the vision for www.mozilla.org going
again. I just reviewed all of the comments in this thread and
combined parts from different posts to get this definition for www.mozilla.org:
"The www.mozilla.org site contains official content that is relevant
to all of the Mozilla community. This includes information about how
to get involved, information about how the community is organized and
governed, and information about the various projects under
development. The site also makes it easy for visitors to find
resources hosted on other community sites."
Does this definition capture the discussion in this thread? Does it
clearly draw a line between www.mozilla.org and other sites? Feel
free to suggest changes.
David
Benjamin Smedberg
> "The www.mozilla.org site contains official content that is relevant
> to all of the Mozilla community. This includes information about how
> to get involved, information about how the community is organized and
> governed, and information about the various projects under
> development. The site also makes it easy for visitors to find
> resources hosted on other community sites."
>
> Does this definition capture the discussion in this thread? Does it
> clearly draw a line between www.mozilla.org and other sites? Feel
> free to suggest changes.
I don't think this reflects the discussion at all. Documents about how to
get involved and information on the various projects are not "official
content" and should live in a wiki.
Additional nitpicks include:
"relevant to all of the Mozilla community" doesn't mean much. Obviously
every page on www.mozilla.org is not going to be relevant to our entire
community.
"resources hosted on other community sites" is pretty vague... there are
other official Mozilla product/project sites which are immediately relevant
to certain classes of community members such as such as www.mozilla.com,
support.mozilla.org, and developer.mozilla.org; then there are "other
related websites" such as planet.mozilla.org and mozillazine which are less
official.
I would propose the following statement:
"The www.mozilla.org homepage should provide a gateway to the web resources
of the Mozilla community, including web resources for developers and users.
The www.mozilla.org website should host official documents of the Mozilla
project and the Mozilla foundation."
--BDS
timeless
> I think this is a good mission statement.
> A good restatement, with a list of subgoals for us. :)
I agree with both.
Reed wrote:
> * Small/new/etc. projects should be moved to a new projects.mozilla.org site
> * More mature projects should be moved to separate domains
> (caminobrowser.org, for example); hosted by MoFo hopefully
I'm not sure. Personally I hate having to search multiple sub domains.
Multiple distinct top level domains are even worse.
See later comments...
Beltzner wrote:
> Who decides what's small/new? And what value is obtained from this
> segmentation? I'd rather have a list of all projects, put the "big"
> (ie: famous in terms of queries or google searches) ones in a section
> at the top, but still make mozilla.org the home for all mozilla related
> projects. Heck, I'd even have pages for mozilla.org/songbird which talk
> about mozilla-derivative projects.
I agree
Hecker writes:
> I think projects like Camino, Seamonkey, Sunbird, etc., having their own
> independent domains is overall a good idea -- I think it gives those
> projects a sense of identity and of not just being part of the
> mozilla.org "grab bag". This is healthy IMO.
I'm in less position to oppose than hecker, and groups certainly can
do this if they want.
KaiRo writes:
> IMHO, the project owners/leaders should decide theirselves if they want
> to have their own domain for their project or not. All projects should
> have some default space though where they can place some basic
> information about their project, e.g. projects.mozilla.org/<projectname>/
> - this can be used as long as the project itself thinks it's enough to
> stick their content there. If and when the project wants to move to using
> their own site/domain, we might even redirect this default space to their
> new site.
Dunno. I suppose bugzilla did this (even before seamonkey/camino did,
and possibly before firefox).
I suppose that my argument for when to provide a domain is basically
when a project has so much distinct content that happen to have
keywords that they pollute general searches that should find things in
other projects about unrelated items.
e.g. How to file a bug can either mean how to file a gecko bug or how
to use bugzilla to file a bug. The overlap for these two is high, and
at some point you really don't want people to try to figure out how
not to get bugzilla results when they want something else.
Note: if a project has fewer than 20 pages, then they can't possibly
flood others out in search results so this explanation would only
apply to projects with lots of content.
fantasai wrote:
> I agree with Beltzner here. I think projects like Seamonkey and Camino
> starting up their own domains is a good idea -- but I think those new
> domains should be an end-user front, just like mozilla.com is for FF/TB.
> Our projects aren't a "grab bag". mozilla.org is not SourceForge, we're
> not cvs+bugzilla hosting. Our software are all interrelated: tied together
> deep throughout the source code. You can't build any of them without Gecko.
> This makes the source code, schedules, documentation, and communities all
> overlap. Significantly. There's more overlap than not. The subprojects are
> all part of the Mozilla Project, and should identify themselves as such.
This is almost true, but the webtools are special here. Sometimes
forgotten even.
Certainly, I want one stop shopping. I hate having to look to more
than one place to find calendars (I've made the mistake of having too
many calendars for myself, as a result I can't even find/point people
to things).
Hecker responds:
> I'm personally happy with this approach: List all projects under
> www.mozilla.organd provide for each the sorts of information appropriate for
> w.m.o (as discussed [below]), and then have optional separate domains containing
> end user information, for any projects that want to do that.
seems fine
> www vs wiki vs projects
would you like 1 headache, 2 headaches, or 3 lumps with your 2
headaches?
Axel wrote:
> 1) When do I put project pages on wiki.m.o, and when onwww.m.o?
Don't forget MDC. (Is that lump 4?)
> I would think that this is something that can be decided depending on
> editing frequency and scale of cooperative editing. Maybe personal taste,
> too.
This makes searching a royal pain.
> 2) Where do I put project pages on wiki.m.o and onwww.m.o?
> Looking at the QA and Project pages for Firefox2, those are at
> completely different hierarchies, some use / for separation, some use :.
> If you want to enter a URL, you need to know which, if you want to
> navigate to it, you need to know the right entry point.
fantasai wrote:
> I personally find this very confusing, but I don't really know what to
> do about it...
We really need to do something. Fewer servers are better. Fewer (one
please!) styles are better.
www.mozilla.org used to have a style guide. I think it got moved.
Which really sucks.
http://www.mozilla.org/README-style.html
http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/writing/guidelines
It was very clear. And any time someone messed up, we suffered
immensely. The worst and perhaps best known example is the CAPS
document
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/components/ConfigPolicy.html
http://bonsai-www.mozilla.org/cvslog.cgi?file=mozilla-org/html/projects/security/components/ConfigPolicy.html&mark=1.1&root=/www/
> I think we can start improving the situation by having all the projects
> choose one (1) of either their wiki site Home_Page or their www site
> index.html as their main entry page page. They should sort out their main
> page content based on that decision, and we should update (revamp)
> http://www.mozilla.org/projects/, have it point to the right main pages,
> and link to it prominently from the front page.
I don't understand this.
Robert Kaiser
> I don't think this reflects the discussion at all. Documents about how to
> get involved and information on the various projects are not "official
> content" and should live in a wiki.
On the contrary, I think that both belong to www.m.o on a certain part,
esp. the "get involved part" which is IMHO the official guideline of how
to get into the community (and www.m.o is abou the community, right?)
and any pages that represent "official" statements about the projects
(those projects that don't have their separate sites elsewhere).
The latter part could move to a projects.m.ozilla.org some time, but as
long as that doesn't exist, its place is in www.m.o/projects/ IMHO.
> "resources hosted on other community sites" is pretty vague... there are
> other official Mozilla product/project sites which are immediately relevant
> to certain classes of community members such as such as www.mozilla.com,
> support.mozilla.org, and developer.mozilla.org; then there are "other
> related websites" such as planet.mozilla.org and mozillazine which are less
> official.
And I think we should also have pointers to those sites on www.m.o
> I would propose the following statement:
>
> "The www.mozilla.org homepage should provide a gateway to the web resources
> of the Mozilla community, including web resources for developers and users.
> The www.mozilla.org website should host official documents of the Mozilla
> project and the Mozilla foundation."
That is too narrow, I think, mainly because of what I pointed out above.
Robert Kaiser
Benjamin Smedberg
> Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
>> I don't think this reflects the discussion at all. Documents about how to
>> get involved and information on the various projects are not "official
>> content" and should live in a wiki.
>
> On the contrary, I think that both belong to www.m.o on a certain part,
> esp. the "get involved part" which is IMHO the official guideline of how
> to get into the community (and www.m.o is abou the community, right?)
Is there any reason why the "get involved" documents can't be publicly
editable like any other wiki page? I think our goal should be to make as
many page as possible publicly editable on a wiki. If that means making all
of www.mozilla.org a wiki and locking down just the policy documents, we
should do that.
> and any pages that represent "official" statements about the projects
> (those projects that don't have their separate sites elsewhere).
> The latter part could move to a projects.m.ozilla.org some time, but as
> long as that doesn't exist, its place is in www.m.o/projects/ IMHO.
I disagree. I believe that the vast majority of the project documents belong
somewhere like wiki.mozilla.org/SeaMonkey or
developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XULRunner with exceptions perhaps for official
lists of reviewers/peers.
>> "resources hosted on other community sites" is pretty vague... there are
>> other official Mozilla product/project sites which are immediately
>> relevant
>> to certain classes of community members such as such as www.mozilla.com,
>> support.mozilla.org, and developer.mozilla.org; then there are "other
>> related websites" such as planet.mozilla.org and mozillazine which are
>> less
>> official.
>
> And I think we should also have pointers to those sites on www.m.o
I agree completely! I do think that we ought to feature the official
product/development site over the much larger set of community websites.
--BDS
Robert Kaiser
> Robert Kaiser wrote:
>> Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
>>> I don't think this reflects the discussion at all. Documents about how to
>>> get involved and information on the various projects are not "official
>>> content" and should live in a wiki.
>> On the contrary, I think that both belong to www.m.o on a certain part,
>> esp. the "get involved part" which is IMHO the official guideline of how
>> to get into the community (and www.m.o is abou the community, right?)
>
> Is there any reason why the "get involved" documents can't be publicly
> editable like any other wiki page? I think our goal should be to make as
> many page as possible publicly editable on a wiki. If that means making all
> of www.mozilla.org a wiki and locking down just the policy documents, we
> should do that.
I think we have a fundamentally different perception of what wiki.m.o is
for. In my eyes, it's a development scratchpad, a playground, just for
drafting stuff things but no content that has any official tag of any
kind associated with it.
And why is doctor so much worse than wiki editing?
Robert Kaiser
Benjamin Smedberg
> I think we have a fundamentally different perception of what wiki.m.o is
> for. In my eyes, it's a development scratchpad, a playground, just for
> drafting stuff things but no content that has any official tag of any
> kind associated with it.
Then we should make www.mozilla.org a wiki.
> And why is doctor so much worse than wiki editing?
* It requires privileges, which makes it very hard to attract new volunteers
to edit/maintain/translate the content
* It doesn't have the dynamic preview of changes nor the talk pages of mediawiki
--BDS
Michael Lefevre
> Robert Kaiser wrote:
>
>> I think we have a fundamentally different perception of what wiki.m.o is
>> for. In my eyes, it's a development scratchpad, a playground, just for
>> drafting stuff things but no content that has any official tag of any
>> kind associated with it.
>
> Then we should make www.mozilla.org a wiki.
I think that idea was suggested a couple of years or more ago, and was
rejected on the basis that all content on mozilla.org was the "official"
word of the Mozilla Foundation, and setting up sufficient access
restrictions on a wiki would require a lot of effort.
I actually have privileges for using doctor (at least I think I still do),
but my understanding was that I shouldn't change anything without filing a
bug in bugzilla and attaching a patch, unless I was the owner of a
particular page or had otherwise been given authority by the owner of a
page (and identifying and contacting the owner wasn't necessarily
straightforward).
Of course, this was before the product content moved to mozilla.com, so
maybe things have changed. But it would make sense to be clear on the
policy before having this kind of discussion...
--
Michael
davidwboswell
I think we're pretty much agreeing on the main points, but are
disagreeing about where to draw the line between www.mozilla.org and
the rest of the community sites. Specifically, I don't think there's
any disagreement in this thread that:
- www.mozilla.org should be an entry point to the community
- www.mozilla.org should be the authoritative voice of the community
for some set of content (it can't be the authoritative voice for
everything since there is content spread across many different sites)
> "resources hosted on other community sites" is pretty vague... there are
> other official Mozilla product/project sites which are immediately relevant
> to certain classes of community members such as such aswww.mozilla.com,
> support.mozilla.org, and developer.mozilla.org; then there are "other
> related websites" such as planet.mozilla.org and mozillazine which are less
> official.
If the site is supposed to be an entry point for the community, then
the whole community needs to be represented on the site, not just
those sites sponsored by MoFo and MoCo. Why shouldn't mozillazine or
mozdev be linked to in addition to MDC and SUMO? For that matter, why
shouldn't projects like Songbird or Joost be linked to in addition to
Bugzilla and Camino? These other related sites and projects are
certainly very relevant for a part of the community.
> "relevant to all of the Mozilla community" doesn't mean much. Obviously
> every page on www.mozilla.org is not going to be relevant to our entire
> community.
IMO, just saying that the site should host official documents is not
enough of a definition to draw any meaningful distinction between www.m.o
and other community sites (the one distinction it does draw is between
the scratchpad wiki.m.o and www.m.o). I agree that "relevant to all
of the Mozilla community" is not precise, but let's replace it with a
positive definition of the site that is better.
David
davidwboswell
process started, but I had thought we should wait until this vision
discussion had reached a consensus before moving forward. If we
aren't able to reach a consensus though, maybe starting the archive
process and having discussions about where specific pages belong will
help us come up with the vision for the whole site.
Is there any objection to getting the archiving process going now? In
practice, this would mean picking a few pages that look like they
might be obsolete, posting the links on the wiki and then discussing
them on this newsgroup (or in a different location if this isn't the
right place for this discussion). After we discuss one batch of
pages, we'll start the process over with a new batch.
fantasai
It still has a style guide.
> Which really sucks.
This I don't understand. It's still there, *and* there's a redirect
to the new location. What are you complaining about?
> http://www.mozilla.org/README-style.html
> http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/writing/guidelines
>> I think we can start improving the situation by having all the projects
>> choose one (1) of either their wiki site Home_Page or their www site
>> index.html as their main entry page page. They should sort out their main
>> page content based on that decision, and we should update (revamp)
>> http://www.mozilla.org/projects/, have it point to the right main pages,
>> and link to it prominently from the front page.
>
> I don't understand this.
My observation was that projects either had a wiki site, a www site, or (often)
both. In all cases it was hard to figure out where the main project site was,
and content was split haphazardly between various parts. So my suggestion was
to tell each project "Give us the URL to your main project site. We don't care
where it is. We will list it on the projects page. No you can't give us two URLs,
you only get to pick one." That may not be the best thing for search or consistency,
but it isn't any worse than what we have now. And then at least then we can make an
index to guide people through the /projects mess, and the projects are forced to
commit to one main page from which they must link all their other resources.
~fantasai