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Wiki

A wiki to provide documentation and feature planning for launchpad projects.

Contact: https://launchpad.net/~xaav/+contactuser
On Launchpad: https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad-project/+bugs?field.tag=wiki

As a Developer
I want a Wiki
so that Projects can provide documentation to their users and developers can plan features more easily.

Rationale

In 2008, a feature request was filed in the launchpad bug tracker. Since that time, it has been approximately 3+ years, and users have requested a wiki on launchpad. The bug now shows up as the hottest bug on the launchpad bug tracker. Yet, this feature has still not been completed.

• -- RobertCollins - the hottest bug system is broken (I intend to blog about that when I have a chance to gather a little more data). The bug doesn't really talk about problems to solve, it kind of grandfathers them in with 'wikis are good' - we need to distill the issue a little more or we are likely to deliver something seriously useful.

A wiki would benefit all users, and complete launchpad. Right now, there is no place for documentation; a wiki would solve this issue. Right now, blueprints link to external wikis (Including this one!). Completing a wiki would remove most of the need for an external site, and if completed, may even eliminate the need for this wiki.

• -- RobertCollins - I'd really like to see more detail here. Free wikis are a dime a dozen - wikia for instance specialising in hosting wikis big and small with all the bells and whistles one could want. What *problem* are we solving by adding a wiki? Is it the setup overhead? Is it the different sites? Is it basic docs?

Stakeholders

This is a community driven project.

• Launchpad product strategist
• Launchpad technical architect

Constraints and Requirements

Must

• Provide a wiki to each project
• Either scale horizontally initially or have a feasible plan for such scaling
• Be free of single-points-of-failure
• Have no requirement for shell access to perform administration

-- RobertCollins - I have rephrased the technical requirements to be assessable (millions of users isn't assessable without a lot of research into user patterns etc). I also removed the xss aspect as 'be secure' is a given -- RobertCollins - I wonder, will project groups, teams, users, distributions and perhaps even source packages want wikis? -- RobertCollins - Will the wikis need to link to each other? -- RobertCollins - What about spam and security? Who gets to edit what wiki? When do they get to edit it?

Nice to have

• Use markdown or equivalent instead of just filtered HTML.
• Render Wiki pages from bazaar branches (Specify which branch to render pages from)
• Be able to edit pages via Web UI. (WMD Editor - Possible?)
• Page refreshless editing of wiki pages.

-- Why are these useful and desirable? It seems to be jumping straight into implementation and that concerns me. Whats the audience of users? What do they want the wiki to do - why would they choose it rather than some competing thing (like e.g. publishing a sphinx doc site on packages.python.org).

Must not

-- RobertCollins - the render limit is already set sitewide for LP - 99% of page renders must be under 1 second (including any cold cache effect), all pages must be under 5 seconds or a timeout will occur. Existing work doesn't completely meet this but we are enforcing it on new works.

Out of scope

Subfeatures

Will use https://launchpad.net/wikkid

-- RobertCollins - why? wikkid is cool but I don't see how we can say its the right choice until we understand why we're doing this. And I don't understand that yet.

Success

How will we know when we are done?

When a collaborative wiki is implemented that provides an easy way to communicate information.

-- RobertCollins - This seems like we're done already - just use a non-LP wiki. Lets make it more focused on things that users will be able to do that they cannot do today?

How will we measure how well we have done?

-- RobertCollins - some possible metrics: user adoption; change rate; Launchpad adopting it for its help and dev wikis?

Thoughts?

URL should be http://wiki.launchpad.net/project-name/Wiki_page

• - This has always been what I thought -- thumper 2011-05-22 23:49:55

We should blacklist the "wiki" name as a series name, to allow the definition of lp:project/wiki to refer to the wiki for a project.

There should be a way to branch the wiki, hack locally, and merge the wiki back to Launchpad's version.

Wikkid was designed from the start to do this. As the primary developer and maintainer of wikkid, I'd love to see it used in Launchpad as it was the initial impetus to get it going -- thumper 2011-05-22 23:49:55