Wiki Week

JKSH

The current organization for translations is similar to MediaWiki.org itself (e.g. see the bar at the top of http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Editing_pages)

What are we lacking? What benefits can subdomains provide?

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First of all one has to decide if multiple languages are needed for a programmers wiki, as one would assume that most "computer guys" more or less speak English. I'd say that there is a need for wiki contents in other languages, at least to make life easier for young people (say: pupils) who don't understand English, yet. My experience is that it is already hard enough to find Qt developers so we should lower the burden for beginners as much as possible. This means we need to create the best UX on our wiki. Now, let's compare Wikipedia and wiki.qt.io:

Wikipedia start page: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2D1UtsPfTx-MzQtMXRrdFczeTQ/view?usp=sharing

wiki.qt.io start page: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2D1UtsPfTx-R3Z4YUxma25hams/view?usp=sharing

=> Wikipedia starts with a language selection. Very easy to understand on first sight. The Qt-wiki starts with a page completely in English with the language switch in the upper area. Most people will recognize that this Qt site looks "like Wikipedia" just because everyone on this planet nows Wikipedia. So the instinctive reaction is to look for other languages on the left of the page. But it's not there. Also the language switch doesn't use language names in their actual languages but ISO country codes that are more or less cryptic, esp. when you're not used to use latin alphabets.

Ok, now I click on "DE" and land on this page: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2D1UtsPfTx-Ui1TeEZxQkJnSjQ/view?usp=sharing

=> On the German Wikipedia each page has a German name, e.g. the "main page" is named "Hauptseite" http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hauptseite . On the Qt wiki it is named "Main/de". And not only doesn't the URI give a useful name to non-English speakers the big title on top of the page also says "Main/de".

=> The side bar and all other controls are still in English although I explicitly switch to a German page. If I wanted to change this I needed to sign up and log in first. How many people will do this when they just landed on this page coming from Google search? I think it's safe to say "no one".

=> Let's scroll down a bit. It says "Lernen (Übersicht)" - Lern (overview) - and below this is a link to code snippets. I hover over it and the popup says "Category:Snippets". Well, I don't know, I don't speak English. I click on it. And I land on this page: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2D1UtsPfTx-cS0xQ1NneUU3SHM/view?usp=sharing
It is an overview over all articles that are tagged as snippets. As there seems to be no German version of this (autogenerated?) page it defaults to English. The overview contains all articles in all languages in a huge list. But still the German articles have an English title (which I don't understand) suffixed by "/de".

And I could go on with this! There is only one way to fix all of these issues and this is to create dedicated mediawiki instances for all the languages. And this implies the use of subdomains.

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@tekojo said:

At least make a list of what it would require.

Sorry, but I'm not a server guy. I have zero experience in setting up webservers/wikis :-(

tekojo

@Wieland sorry, meant that we can take that as something we figure out next week.
Wasn't expecting you to make the list :)

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@tekojo Ah, ok :-) Added it to the wiki.

JKSH

@Wieland: Good points on poor user experience for non-English readers. Note that some of the issues boil down to the messy organization of the English pages themselves. For example, even I (an English native speaker) find the large list of snippets to be a poor way to present items.

(I'm not convinced that it's a good idea to encourage users to post small snippets, actually... but that's for a separate discussion)

=> On the German Wikipedia each page has a German name, e.g. the "main page" is named "Hauptseite" http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hauptseite . On the Qt wiki it is named "Main/de". And not only doesn't the URI give a useful name to non-English speakers the big title on top of the page also says "Main/de".

This can currently be alleviated by using {{DISPLAYTITLE:}}. See http://wiki.qt.io/Adjust_Spacing_and_Margins_between_Widgets_in_Layout/de

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Hi everyone,
I will dedicate some time to improving the wiki today. I was just wondering what the exact purpose of the wiki is. I mean, one can't make changes to a system without knowing what it's actually good for. Is there any common sense about what belongs in the wiki and what doesn't?

tekojo

In general the wiki in Qt has been used as a place to store knowledge. In other words, anything that isn't completely static (should be on the web pages) or documentation (should be in documentation) has been put in the wiki.

The wiki should be a place where the community finds and stores information that changes.

That said, the wiki suffers from outdated information, and lack of clean structure. The front page looks fairly ok, maybe too many topics in there.
Another problem is with information that probably should not be on the wiki. We don't have a place to move things out of there. For example on the front page it says that code examples are not best placed in the wiki (I agree), but we don't have a canonical place for community snippets and examples. Maybe a github group would be the thing for that?

I didn't help much, did I.

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@tekojo Thanks! To be a bit more specific: For example, the main page shows a table with Qt releases. Should this really be there?
You said: "anything not completely static or documentation" and ideally not snippets and examples. So, what is left? Tutorial articles? Something like book chapters? Or is the wiki just the place to dump everything that has no other place? (Sorry if this is a silly question, but I don't want to invest time without knowing what the wiki should actually look like.)

tekojo

Not a stupid question at all.

Maybe a good approach is that taken in fantasy/scifi worlds. There is canon (in our case documentation and project code) and things that are either not yet canonised or will not be canon, but are important. The wiki should be the place for the later. A lot of material is needed to explain Qt, and the wiki is the place for that.

This brings in the problem of how the wiki should be organised. I like the front page for being organised around things that you might do. That is a good approach, it makes finding things simpler. However too many items on a page make it harder to read and find things.

The release table appeared there a couple of days back. It makes sense to have one (we didn't previously). But probably it should be a page with a link to it from the main page. With the link probably under developing Qt.

JKSH

@Wieland said:

For example, the main page shows a table with Qt releases. Should this really be there?

@tekojo said:

The release table appeared there a couple of days back. It makes sense to have one (we didn't previously). But probably it should be a page with a link to it from the main page. With the link probably under developing Qt.

I added that table a few days ago, but didn't intend for the full table to be on the front page for long. (I didn't want to spend time creating an additional brief table then, and I was also being sneaky in trying to increase its visibility this way.)

I quite like how Ubuntu has presented their release info:

Main page with small table: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Home
Detailed tables: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Would you be willing to polish that, @Wieland?

A lot of material is needed to explain Qt, and the wiki is the place for that.

I was thinking about the history of Qt. There's a very nice but very brief overview at http://qt.io/qt20 -- it would be great to expand on that. It doesn't belong in official documentation (especially the parts about old versions), but would be right at home in the wiki.

This brings in the problem of how the wiki should be organised. I like the front page for being organised around things that you might do. That is a good approach, it makes finding things simpler. However too many items on a page make it harder to read and find things.

Agreed.

I think the following would be helpful for the main page:

Make the Release Info table briefer, move the full table elsewhere (and expand it -- it's not complete yet)
Move less important links into their "Overview" pages to declutter the main page
Use boxes and icons for visual grouping (I find a long hierarchical list hard to read)

Related to organization, we also need to overhaul the Categories system. There are too many single-member categories.

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@JKSH Valid points.

Would you be willing to polish that

Sure! :-)

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Hello everyone,

I've made some changes to the main page. I haven't actually deleted anything but mostly created a handful of new pages and moved stuff there. Of course it's far from being complete but I think one can get an idea of what my intentions are. I would be happy to get some feedback from you before I go on.

Cheers!

SGaist

Looks good, easier to read than before

JKSH

@Wieland said:

Hello everyone,

I've made some changes to the main page. I haven't actually deleted anything but mostly created a handful of new pages and moved stuff there. Of course it's far from being complete but I think one can get an idea of what my intentions are. I would be happy to get some feedback from you before I go on.

Cheers!

It's much tidier than before. I like it! Thanks!

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Hi guys!

I'm currently gathering information needed to improve the "Supported Platforms" page. By now it is more or less repeating what is already stated here and here. I would like to add some info that is hard to find elsewhere and I need some help: What platforms is Qt known to work on that are not supported either by The Qt Company or the community? E.g. I know that one can use it on FreeBSD. What else do we have? What about the other *BSDs, OpenIndiana, Haiku? What about VxWorks? VxWorks runs on all industrial robots made by Kuka (very big market share). And it drives the NASA mars rovers. Another thing is gaming consoles: Are there any for that one can write games with Qt? What about stuff like home automation, car entertainment systems, machine tools or process automation?

Cheers!

JKSH

@Wieland, good questions.

Repetitions: We should try to minimize repetitions. The wiki could simply provide links to the official docs.
Platforms: I don't know much about this topic, but...
- http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/supported-platforms.html mentions VxWorks, which is supported via the commercial license IIRC (so I'm not sure why it's in the "Community Supported Platforms" page).
- Someone's working on a Haiku port: https://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/qt_53_haiku_progress
Gaming consoles: I haven't heard of anyone doing that, but Windows 10 is coming to the XBox One so we might be able to get it to work there with minimal effort.
Home/process automation, car entertainment:
- There are key focuses of the Qt World Summit this year: https://www.qtworldsummit.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/QtWS15_CallForPapers_May312015.pdf
- See also http://www.qt.io/case-navico/ and http://www.qt.io/case-panasonic/
Process automation: My day job is to develop industrial measurement and control systems. A key component of these systems are the industrial communication protocols, which Qt itself doesn't provide (except Qt Serial Port). My company uses LabVIEW which has good support for these protocols and other features that target industrial systems. However, I have used Qt to implement the GUI for 1 project so far, where the client wanted a fancy, flexible GUI -- this is where Qt outshines LabVIEW.

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Hello @JKSH,

thank you very much for your extensive reply and the links! Regarding repetitions: Agreed. I will remove these parts from the wiki. Haiku : Awesome! Didn't know the guys were that near to a working port.

Thanks again!
Bye!

SGaist

IIRC, the PS3 could run linux (Yellow Dog Linux if memory serves well but also OpenSuse and Ubuntu) at least the original systems but not the latest iterations. The latest firmware also disabled that possibility but if the OS had X running, then Qt was probably supported.

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@SGaist Yes, I remember when Sony shipped a new firmware that made it impossible to install Linux on the PS3. Big fail.