Beowiki:Restructuring (Fall 2008)

This is a working document containing plans for reorganizing the Beowulf wiki. Preliminary planning for this project started in Fall 2008, with work starting in Summer 2010.

Goals & Steps
The overarching goal of this project is to help the Beowulf wiki be more clear, consistent, and complete. Here are some of the subgoals and steps to achieve them:

High-level organization

 * Allow pages to be found easily
 * Similar pages together (categories, namespaces, subpages? See .)
 * No orphaned pages
 * Make pages consistent with organization
 * Categorize
 * Merge redundant pages

Page-level changes

 * Make pages more informative
 * Add summaries to make its purpose obvious
 * Add maintainer, date information?
 * Handle old/incomplete pages
 * Mark (categories, templates)
 * Fix
 * Make pages more consistent in style
 * Update current pages
 * Create guidelines for new pages

Additions

 * Merge information from the Beowulf blog, project info on the CS website, etc. into wiki
 * Encourage Beowulf users to document their projects on the wiki

Organization
Here is a rough organization scheme for the wiki:


 * About the program would have general information about the St. Olaf Beowulf project.
 * Documentation would contain information intended to help users and maintainers make use of the clusters, both with hardware and software. It would be mostly, though not strictly, contributed to by the cluster maintainers.
 * Cluster information would contain pages about the current setup of the clusters.
 * Installation/Administration would contain guides intended for setting up and maintaining the clusters.
 * Use would contain guides for end-users.
 * Projects would include project proposals, working pages, and information about completed projects. It would also include students' papers, lists of St. Olaf classes that have used the cluster, etc. It would be the area where cluster users would contribute most actively.
 * Cluster administration would document projects related to the cluster itself.
 * Distributed computing would document projects that use the cluster.
 * Wiki usage & policies would contain information about the Wiki, its layout, and how to contribute.

Although the main points (About, Documentation, Projects, Wiki) could be more-or-less hierarchical, there could certainly be overlap, especially in the more specific areas. More detailed organization would also be possible. For instance, the "Projects" section would, in addition to the organization above, have separate categories for Proposals, Working Pages, and Past Projects, all of which would overlap with the ones already mentioned. Also importantly, "Documentation" would probably have Hardware and Software categories overlapping with the ones above.

Method of Organization
Looking at the Wiki currently, it appears that many people have used different schemes from the MediaWiki software to add some sort of organization. Some page names have pseudo-namespaces like "Ethics:" and "Proposal:" before them, while others have pseudo-subpages, like "Docs/Cluster Setup", etc. Of course, although it is possible with a change of settings, the Wiki currently does not recognize these namespaces, and it treats pages with slashes like normal pages, without the extra features for subpages. If these are going to be used in organizing the wiki, the settings should at least be changed to use their actual features.

Given the overlap in the organization already mentioned, I would lean toward using MediaWiki's Categories feature over either of these. Adding extra namespaces adds more clutter to the wiki, and adding something like "Docs/Use/Hadoop/" before every page seems like more trouble than it is worth. Categories are less permanent (changing a page's category requires a simple edit rather than a page move) and more flexible, allowing overlap.

Of course, there would be appropriate places for the namespace and subpage features. A "Beowiki" namespace already exists, and seems to me like a good place for the pages relating to Wiki usage to go. Subpages could be useful in long tutorials, for example, where each subpage could document a large step in the process. However, I do not think they should be used for the overall organization.

—Yates