Splitting off a devel wiki?

[Adrian Buehlmann]

On 04.11.2009 07:56, Peter Arrenbrecht wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 12:41 AM, Adrian Buehlmann <adrian at cadifra.com> wrote:
>> Today we had some discussions on IRC about how to improve the wiki.
>>
>> I think we really should move the Mercurial _development_ related
>> pages out of the current wiki http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki
>>
>> Best would be a *second* wiki, maybe at
>> http://mercurial-devel.selenic.com/wiki ?
>>
>> This would also match the current two list mailing-list structure.
>>
>> It would help considerably to have a cleaner wiki about Mercurial
>> *usage* alone.
> [snip]
> 
> Is the problem that these pages show up in search results?
> -parren
> 

Not only there.

Recent changes is another example.

And yes, these pages sometimes show up even higher in google searches
than the pages about usage of mercurial.

Inside the wiki, these pages show up for example in the title search
and the full text search, which affects people looking for info
about how to use the tool.

They devel pages are also inevitably part of the category system
that starts at http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/CategoryCategory
(CategoryNewFeatures, CategoryContributing).

I've had quite a couple of feedback from people reporting
that they were considerably confused by the devel and meta things in
the current wiki.

People *are* sensitive about "dev chatter" and irrelevant
search results.

These pages contain meta talk about the project, talk about potential
future features, plans how to get there, implementation details, etc.

This is something which is bad and confusing for people looking for
info about how to _use_ the tool. It gives a strong smell of
"unfinished", "not official", "ad hoc", "still under construction",
"not yet ready for use", "the devs are still debating about it".

In short: it reduces the signal to noise ratio for the majority of
the users of the wiki.

This is not to say that the devel pages aren't vital. They *are* vital
for the project. Having devel wiki pages is absolutely important.

Just not in the main wiki.

On another note, it might be possible to move these wiki pages into
a wiki on another domain, if it turns out that setting it up on
selenic.com is not feasible for lack of resources (site admin time,
server resources, etc.).