Wiki Week

? Offline · T tekojo 13 May 2015, 05:15

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

JKSH · wrote on 18 May 2015, 12:48

@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

? Offline · wrote on 21 May 2015, 04:32

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 · 21 May 2015, 09:47

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That said, the wiki suffers from outdated information, and lack of clean structure.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.

? Offline · 21 May 2015, 16:01

@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 · wrote on 21 May 2015, 13:05

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 · 21 May 2015, 16:18

@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.

? Offline · J JKSH 21 May 2015, 16:01

@JKSH Valid points.

Would you be willing to polish that

Sure! :-)

? Offline · 23 May 2015, 02:40

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 · wrote on 22 May 2015, 21:21

Looks good, easier to read than before

JKSH · wrote on 23 May 2015, 02:40

@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!

? Offline · 23 May 2015, 04:52

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 · 23 May 2015, 13:47

@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.

? Offline · J JKSH 23 May 2015, 04:52

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 · 24 May 2015, 12:15

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.

? Offline · S SGaist 23 May 2015, 21:06

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

? Offline · wrote on 24 May 2015, 12:51

Hi everyone!
While I'm cutting my way through the wiki I'm wondering what's the difference between a snippet, a howto, a demo and an example? Any ideas? :-)

SGaist · 24 May 2015, 22:52

Hi,

I'd say demos and examples are pretty much the same with the difference that an example shows/explains basic concepts and a demo goes further. I see a snippet being a code sample that you can easily reuse in your project e.g. a sorting algorithm for Qt's container class. Howto should be a an example/demo with complete explanation on how to do a given task/solve a given problem.

? Offline · S SGaist 24 May 2015, 22:28

@SGaist Thanks. That sounds sane. The problem with this regarding the wiki is that only a few people seem to have a clue about this classification and thus the coresponding categories get mixed up. I'm looking for an easy to understand definition of the terms so that we can put it on the wiki to help people finding the right category for their content.

? Offline · J JKSH 21 May 2015, 16:01

@JKSH said:

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

I managed to get rid of about 80% of them. Now it's up to the admins to delete the remaining 171 (!) unused categories... :-)

Edit: I think by now categories are a big pain in the arse: They are hard to maintain because only admins can move them and it seems that everyone thinks that his/her article needs to be a category by its own. IMAO we need some very strict policy to fight this.

Edit2: Maybe we should rethink the categories system and use it a bit differently than intended by its inventors. Category pages are in some way stupid because one cannot localize them because there is always only one category page and the suffix-stuff doesn't work there. But: The content that is automatically generated there is language agnostic to users who are logged in. What if we forbid the manual editing of category pages by policy and give the suffix /en to all English content? I'm not sure yet if this is a good idea. Honestly, I tend to think this would be a dirty workaround. I still think that dedicated mediawikis in subdomains would be much cleaner. What do you think?