Hello,

I've been quite active on MozillaZine dev forums and the dev part of
their wiki. As someone who spend quite a lot of time helping others
with dev troubles, I'm really glad to see you working on devmo, thanks.

However, having article names like "JavaScript:References:Core
JavaScript 1.5 Reference:Objects:Array" strikes me as not really a good
idea. It defeats one of main concepts of wiki, accidental linking (when
one doesn't have to use the pipe syntax), makes it hard to move a page
in docs hierarchy (so it's crucial to get the hierarchy right *now*)
and makes mediawiki categories
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Category> close to useless (though
it looks like you're not going to use them anyways).

What's even more important, the wiki source of some pages becomes
unreadable, see
<http://developer-test.mozilla.org/docs/index.php?title=JavaScript:References:Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference&action=edit>
or
<http://developer-test.mozilla.org/docs/index.php?title=JavaScript:References:Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference:Objects:Array&action=edit&section=14>
for example.

MozillaZine KB also started with a similar naming scheme for their
support pages (in fact it was slightly worse, using space-colon-space
as separator, e.g. Firefox_:_FAQs_:_Themes). After four months (~ April
2004) many people realized it was a bad idea, they rewrote the rules,
but there are still a lot of pages that use that old naming convention.

I understand that this project is huge and using short article titles
may not work in your case. I'm just saying, I don't see much point in
making it *that* hard to create any links.

Perhaps it's possible to write a hack that (1) allows simple
filesystem/url-like shortcuts, like [[.:blah]] for links to a "sibling"
article and [[..]] for a "parent" article, and (2) makes the displayed
title of article be the "leaf name". I'm not a PHP person, but from
what I've seen in mediawiki, they don't have support for these kinds of
extensions, so it will cause problems when you need to upgrade wiki
software.


Also from our experience at MZ wiki, dividing information into FAQs and
Tips (as you suggest on your user page) makes the information harder to
find by navigating wiki. FAQs should not be a branch in the hierarchy,
but a special manually maintained page. All articles that are put in
FAQs should have a real place in the hierarchy. Just sharing
experience.

Good luck,
-Nick

btw, pardon my ignorance, who are the devmo drivers? fantasai and Deb?

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