Table of Contents
Welcome to the Gardeners Lounge
Quick Guide for Wiki Contributors
- You find templates here: templates
- The syntax for DokuWiki can be found here: syntax
- For wiki related ideas, questions and critique, see discussion
- How we communicate with each other
- If you want to work on migration, see migrating
- If you want to read a fancy HowTo write a Howto
Mantras
- Redundancy (or Modularity I) : Information shall appear in the wiki only once. If it be needed somewhere else, we refer to it with a link!
Articles you shall link to are e.g. usb.storage, LuCI, generic.overview, generic.flashing, etc. DO NOT explain those procedures again! - Cooperation (or Modularity II): seriously consider contributing up stream. Put only OpenWrt-related stuff here, for example wireless.overview, but contribute more general information up stream: i.e. http://linuxwireless.org/, Comparison_of_open_source_wireless_drivers, etc. For more upstream pages look here. Not all employ wikies.
- Actuality: all articles should generally reflect information that is valid for the current stable release. Information that applies to trunk builds only, should be marked as such.
- Searchability most people will search for information with the search engine of their choice. The less garbage there is in this wiki, the better articulated content and titles are, the higher the probability that information is found swiftly! Feel free to try and solve some problem by searching for a solution with your favorite search engine. If you won't find your own content, others probably won't as well!
E.g. installing.opkg.packages.in.mount.point.other.than.root is a long title that could be replaced with something like opkg – Installation Destinations, but the latter will not be as easily be found as the first one when someone does not browse the wiki, but uses a search engine instead.
Structure
To give the Wiki a better structure, we employ namespaces and categories (and tags):
- Namespaces are highest. In each of these upper namespaces, there shall be a maximum of 3 (three) sublevels.
- Categories provide the first level of the namespaces. They distinguish different kinds of docs:
- doc:devel !OpenWrt explicitly addresses developers!
- hardware about the hardware: about SoC, about CPUs (often called Cores), about soldering, etc. Cooperation with other Wikis WANTED
- howto stuff you do, after you successfully installed OpenWrt.
- howtobuild stuff you do before you even have an image
- recipes probed scenarios
- techref Technical Reference
- uci explanations for specific uci-configuration files like
/etc/config/network
- Tags are different. While the structure is exclusive, you can place an article only in one subcategory, tags are more flexible. More of them can be placed simultaneously in one article, and thus allow for a more flexible categorizing. To reproduce this with the structure we could write symbolic articles, which are placed in different subcategories and redirect to one article. But let's not do that. Tags will prove most useful, when you want to search for routers with certain features.
- tags Overview
Guides
Instead of just blindly relying on the logic of our structure, I've taken the liberty to create some guides. These articles address certain users or a certain task to be done. They contain little own content but many links to already existent articles:
- user.beginner is better then a naked generic.flashing
- basic.config is kind of an über-article for UCI and non-UCI configurations for all starters
- internet.connection is kind of an über-article for network
- user.advanced is somehow superfluous, its content could be merged into a couple of about-articles
Also some articles to further help users:
Again: Beginners lack knowledge and experience, they are not (necessarily) stupid!
ToDo List
If you want to contribute, these are the top open issues we need help with:
- Migrating Oldwiki pages migrating
- A solution for redundancy and the hardware features: We describe it in the ToH, then under "Hardware Highlights", then under "Info" in the hardware section and then again in the tag-footer. That's four times exactly the same information! What we want is to have the info only once and then point to it.
- Templates for articles
- Howto for moderators moderating.
For finding stuff if visitors use their brains instead of the search function:
- howtos "Overview"-Articles like webinterface.overview or http.overview. This is particularly useful, because many packages names say nothing about their functionality. Sometimes a simple
opkg info *webserver*does help, but very often it does not. You definitely won't find all web servers that way. Especially the English language does not have any stern rules on howto to write composite words. Could be web server, webserver, web-server, http-server, you name it. That's why we use the protocol names: HTTP, FTP, SMTP, etc
Users and Permissions
- Visitors just pass by and read what they find useful. They don't need logins.
- Gardeners are all the great people creating and editing information in this wiki. Gardeners are allowed to edit all docs, but to prevent structural chaos, new articles can only be dropped into the inbox. To be a gardener all you need to do is to create an account and log in.
- Moderators are the ones who are mastering the disaster, they need to keep looking at the inbox and have an eye on edits throughout the entire wiki. Moderators take care of, and have of their focus on, structure and content.
- Admins are there to help out everywhere and also manage user permissions.
More information on the moderation process: moderating.
Redirects
@ADMINS: It would be nice, if redirects would only be needed to keep things working from the outside, i.e. if you move a page, and somebody had bookmarked this, a redirect could make this bookmark still work.
It would however not be good, if the internal links would rely on working redirects! In Dokuwiki redirects are provided by a Plugin.