Wiki Documentation of krpano - proposal

    Klaus, I have an idea.

    What about to install mediawiki and put the documentation on it.
    And then allow some users (that you can trust them) to edit the wiki?

    I know, you have not so many time to create help documentation and I understand it as programmer. *wink*
    Because we all have fun to programm but not to write the boring help.

    But If you let us to create help in this way, I think, it can give us good result.

    If you want I can help you to start, install and write basic docs, because some time ago I have been playing arund the mediawiki and found it very good for documentation.

    What do you and others think?

    Regards
    Greg

    I'm up for it .

    Sometimes I find new things out while doing different projects or manage to decipher some technical jargon that many of us don't understand and would be more than happy to add things to the wiki.

    Klaus, your Flash and iPhone viewer has a big following so the wiki will soon grow. After several months and you can create your own 'Official' documentation if you wish simply with a lot of copy and pasting rather than typing.

    Good idea Greg. You are the wise one *thumbsup*

    Andrew

    Next to do is to create the help pages, I mean to write all tags description and so on.
    I have made one page for example:
    https://krpano.com/docu/wiki/index.php/Krpano

    Here is basic help, how to format wiki text at all:
    http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting

    It is easy, for example to do bold text you put it inside three apostrophe: '''bold'''
    and so on.

    But I think, at first, the Klaus should tell as and give example how the pages should be formated.
    Another thing is to think about main categiories to create.

    How to start a new page that not exists?
    The easier way is to type the word into search field of wiki. For example type: scene.
    Then it will be shown that the page doesn't exists and you can create it.
    So click "create this page" and you can write the description of the scene's tag...

    I think we can write the raw texts for now, and later to format it.

    Regards
    Greg

    EDIT:
    Klaus, you as administrato can edit left side of wiki, the part of menu.
    Look here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interface/Sidebar

    Hi,

    thanks!

    I have installed it also locally, I will play with it,
    it will need some time to find out how to use it of course
    and I'm not sure about the structure yet,

    it is possible to 'collapse' elements there?
    that could make things cleaner...

    best regards,
    Klaus

    Not sure of the best approach... but a starting point would be to mirror the existing documentation structure onto the wiki.

    I think it's one of those things that will be great in a couple weeks / months... but the initial launch is a bit cumbersome.

    But, I tried to do a little bit to help..

    https://krpano.com/docu/wiki/index.php/Xml_reference

    ---------------------------

    Some more thoughts...

    First - if you (Klaus) decide to commit to a wiki, then eventually you can remove the documentation that is on the site here . That can be a good thing as it would enable others to update the documentation while you churn out updates. Based upon my experience with this community, I'd say that it would be in good hands. However, my very brief experience with playing with my own wiki is that it is very easy for someone to create an account and fill the thing with links to porn and pill sites. There might be automated tools that can combat this... but it will also place some burden on you and active contributors to monitor and clean up those items. I'm not suggesting that you don't move forward... just throwing out a word of caution as you do.

    Second - Basic Structure...
    The popularity of krpano will draw many types of users... at various stages of knowledge about krpano, and panorama photography in general. I think the wiki structure could be setup to reflect those various user levels... and the workflows they would follow for publishing panos using krpano.

    The problem is that I can't come up with an optimal structure right now... so maybe the above is just something to keep in consideration as the wiki articles are developed.

    Here lies the challenge with all things... how to structure things. At least the wiki structure enables a fair amount of flexibility to adjust as things develop.

    Please sticky this thread, Klaus, and let's work on this seriously! If I arrived to the conclusion that a wiki was necessary after only a week (and found this thread when checking if anyone had previously thought the same), then it's probably because we really need one :P

    EDIT: I'm actually experienced with mediawiki and fired up to help with this, so why don't you give me administrator access? ;) FTP access to localsettings.php would help, too! I don't think you have anything to lose; Feel free to back up first, of course.

    I don't know if this is possible, but i propose this structure for categories/sub-categories. It is similar to what we already have in the documentation section and mixes a bit of the forum categories; Bold text are categories and those that follow with an hyphen are sub-categories.
    xml
    - all tags

    actions
    - all possible actions

    tools
    - kprotect
    - kmakemultires
    - ....

    html/javascript
    - local usage
    - javascript interface

    actionscript/flash/flex

    plugins
    - soundinterface
    - radar
    - videoplayer
    - .....

    iphone/ipad

    ------------------------------------------------------------------
    One more thing: Whenever anyone contributes something to the documentation, please mention the version information. Be it player, tools, plugins or whatever. Something like "version 1.0.8.11 OS: Windows".

    Looks good to me. I don't usually use categories, but I guess they can only help. I already began adding stuff. There were also other pages people started months ago but they're very incomplete, so I'll merge them later. I'd like to wait for enough access to add styles for templates before getting started on actual pages for the actions and xml tags, but everyone please go and help yourselves to material from the old documentation and start copying it to the wiki (we'll also need klaus to set up image uploads here); Also finish the quick descriptions in the action list ^^ If anyone wants to change the stuff I added to the front page, that's just placeholder links to help people find stuff, I'm no good with front pages.

    Guys, this is a great idea. Why didn't I (or anyone else) come up with this earlier?!

    While I've had some decent experience with MediaWiki 4 years ago, I'm not the most up-to-date anymore. But what I'd suggest is that Klaus find a couple of guys with decent MediaWiki (backend as well as administration) knowledge to get things polished an ready for primetime. This includes:

    • Coming up with a rough structure of the whole documentation
    • Designing the landing page (and working on the theme some more, if desired)
    • Creating templates (for the xml entries, for instance), so same things look the same
    • Adding useful extensions for our context
    • Some amount of user / community management
    • Just generally tidying up things, here and there

    I would add one more category terminology . This will explain the general terms used in virtual tour photography. Things like explanations for cylinder, spherical, cubical images; panoramas; virtual tours; stitching; fov etc.

    Quote from Protected

    Please sticky this thread, Klaus, and let's work on this seriously! If I arrived to the conclusion that a wiki was necessary after only a week (and found this thread when checking if anyone had previously thought the same), then it's probably because we really need one :P


    okay, it's sticked now *wink*

    Quote

    EDIT: I'm actually experienced with mediawiki and fired up to help with this, so why don't you give me administrator access? ;) FTP access to localsettings.php would help, too! I don't think you have anything to lose; Feel free to back up first, of course.


    yes, you will get a mail soon,

    best regards,
    Klaus

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