Talk:Gramps 5.1 Wiki Manual
Wiki Manual, User manual, ... ?
The menu on the left shows User manual and takes you to this page Gramps 5.1 Wiki Manual. This is inconsistent and irritating. I suggest to use User Manual like the title of a book. When the Gramps version is important, I suggest to use parentheses, e.g. User Manual (Gramps 5.1). Furthermore, the top of the page could indicate where a user would find the User Manuals of previous Gramps versions.
Thanks, I'd grown familiar & oblivious to some of your observations.
Expanded the "Abstract" in the header section to reinforce 'wiki' make finding an archived manual easier. Added a 'Wiki' term to the Glossary.
The consistency on 'Wiki Manual' versus 'User Manual' is also a good point. That decision is up to our Webmaster. I'm inclined to agree that the sidebar 'User Manual' should be changed to 'Wiki Manual'
I think we're stuck with the 'Gramps 5.1' prefixes. They are part of the MediaWiki file organization system. But it is also vital for the Search Engine indexing ... so that people get to the right edition for the right software product. Also, having a fully qualified page title makes the Printable (print to PDF) page distinct from outdated copies.
The use of parentheticals is a style discussion, I think. Usually, one considers such qualifications contextually implied. (Just as you might say '1965 Ford Mustang automobile' in general conversation but only '1965 Ford Mustang' on a muscle car website, just '1965 Mustang' on a Ford corporate website and just "'65" in a Mustang group.) Our first mention is (hopefully) fully qualified but uses the shortened form elsewhere. In the menu, the Gramps is implied while the version qualification is left off to keep from having to amend instruction on the mailgroup & in other venues.
Bamaustin (talk) 16:32, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
- I would like to vote for 'User Manual' over 'Wiki Manual': A 'User Manual' is a well-known term for the general computer user. We both understand what a 'Wiki Manual' is but I am afraid that users new to Gramps could be irritated by such an unfamiliar phrase. Furthermore, the word 'wiki' appears already more than once in the sidebar. 'wiki' to me is a technique rather than contents. When looking for information, I'd rather steer to a familiar 'User Manual'. Even MediaWiki has no 'Wiki ...' but it offers 'User help' and a 'Technical manual', even though all contents is 'wiki'. Hence, my thumbs are up for User Manual. --Wribln (talk) 17:16, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
- One more argument for 'User Manual': Within Gramps, F1 brings you to the 'User Manual'. --Wribln (talk) 17:21, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
+1 Renaming or calling the next "...Wiki Manual" to "...User Manual" would make it easier for people to understand they are same thing. -- Adam.
- Will do with wikipedia, Thanks --Adamvazquez (talk) 23:44, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
- I like this idea and agreed, but as it will involve [ ] changing the Gramps program code to point to the new name [ ] updating wiki redirect templates on artciles outside the user manual and [ ] involve a rename when I roll over the user manual if this ends up being done this will have to wait for the next major release eg: Gramps 5.2.x.
- > I think we're stuck with the 'Gramps 5.1' prefixes. They are part of the MediaWiki file organization system. But it is also vital for the Search Engine indexing ... so that people get to the right edition for the right software product. Also, having a fully qualified page title makes the Printable (print to PDF) page distinct from outdated copies.
- Not really; it's not part of the mediawiki file system or even needed for the search engine, an alternative suggestion is that it maybe possible to drop the word "Gramps" altogether because the user manual is already on the Gramps website and simply use the version number as the prefix and the word "user manual" eg: 5.2 User Manual
- eg: so pages urls would be shorter and look like the following:
- https://gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php/5.2_User_Manual
- https://gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php/5.2_User_Manual_-_Preface
- etc..making it obvious (to me at the moment) that is for the 5.2 version of Gramps, what do you think?
- I'll raise a feature request to keep track of this when I get a moment.
- Thanks everyone for your contributions to making the documentation easier to get to. --Sam888 (talk) 02:18, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
Sorry... I was more referring to the version number than the 'Gramps' portion of the prefix when writing that it was part of the organization we chose with MediaWiki content management. Although I hadn't even considered the option of dropping the Gramps & keeping the version.
It is REALLY nice that when a page URL pops up for a page of the manual, I can just change the version number... and go to the current manual or back a few version to see how a feature worked previously.
We've had some Discussions about retiring the superseded manual pages. But that is complicated with so many people choosing to stick the old revisions or evaluating from bundled versions in various Linux distributions. I suppose we could put in placeholder redirects. That would keep the Help from breaking in older version (albeit with it pointing to pages with features & functionality differences. But all the subsection anchors might break) It would also help with Search Engine indexing... they demote redirect pages in the rankings. It probably won't help with the internal search of our our MediaWiki installation. But we could add noindex 'magic words' to the redirects to improve the accuracy of the internal search.
Another possibility would be to do URL rewrite rules at the server level... before MediaWiki ever gets the request. That's pretty finicky work & it'd be easy to mess up.
Bamaustin (talk) 03:53, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
> It is REALLY nice that when a page URL pops up for a page of the manual, I can just change the version number... and go to the current manual or back a few version to see how a feature worked previously
+100 this is what I do also, if the name does change as suggested by Bamaustin consider also making redirects either using mediawiki or as rewrite rules in the .htaccess file. If the redirect are done then I'm all for renaming idea to use a more customary name for the manual. --Gioto (talk) 07:17, 15 June 2020 (UTC)