Wiki development and enhancement

This page lists developments and enhancements to the Wiki hat have been proposed or are in progress. You can add your own ides.

Summary

Every wiki is work-in-progress, not only in terms of the content, but also the wiki infrasructiure itself, such as how you interact with it and its appearance.

This page is a repository of enhancements that have been suggested or are in development. If you have an idea about how the Wiki could be made better or easier to use, you can consult this page to see whether it has already been suggested. If so, maybe you can help refine the idea, but if not, please feel free to add it to this page, or if your idea needs further thought, click the Discuss tab and add it to the talk page.

Please note that if you have comments or ideas relating to wiki content you can leave them on the Discussion page associated with that content. (Click the "Other" tab, then "Edit Discussion".) This page is for developments relating to the infrastructure of the wiki itself.

Wiki Developments

Topic Description Status
Visual editor Edting wiki content, though not difficult, is daunting for the inexperienced. Wikimedia now offers a visual editor, eliminating all need for an understanding of wiki mark-up. There may be knock-on implications for the wiki menu structure that will need to be resolved.


On attempting to implement this, it was found that the Visual Editor was incompatible with the Translation extensions, causing a lot of heart-searching as to which we needed most. But it now appears that this incompatibility is resolved in the latest version of Mediawiki, which we will need to move to.

Completed Sep 2022
Editing Discuss pages It's easy to access the Discuss page associated with any wiki content page, but if you then click Edit, it assumes you want to edit the content page, not the Discuss page. For that, you have to click "Other", then "Edit Discussion". This is unhelpful. Scheduled
"Other" or "More" The last tab on a page is labelled "Other". "More" would be more inviting. People always want "more", but "other", not so much if they're reasonably happy with what they've got. Scheduled
Headings in Main Page In the Main Page, it's too easy to click Edit when you only meant to expand a section.

At least enclose "edit" in square brackets as elsewhere. Maybe move it to the right and/or move the expand/collapse icon to the left.

Discussion
E-book creation It would be nice if it were possible to extract selected or all pages and export them as an e-book for offline reading and reference.

A wikimedia extension does or did exist to do this but is believed to have problems.

Discussion
Summary repair info An experimental Alexa skill was developed a few years ago, which contained brief repair info on various classes of device. Some of this info could maybe be used to enhance the summary sections of the relevant pages. Complete - Aug 22
Long pages Some pages are quite long, and might be considered off-putting simply by their length. We need to review whether any can be split, perhaps by separating theory of operation from repair advice. However, whilst people will have a tendency to skip the theory and get straight on to the fixing, diagnosis and repair are more likely to be successful with an understanding of the theory, hence the theory should not be in any sense demoted. Discussion

External links

None.