Sailfishos.wiki - An attempt to create an Archwiki-like community wiki for SFOS

General
#1

In the December I promised setting up a community wiki and here it finally is, albeit a bit delayed :wink:

https://sailfishos.wiki

Why?

I’m personally annoyed by how often the same question are asked on this forum because people don’t search or don’t get the answered thread as result. Instead of being mad at the users I want to provide a solution. Additionally, I like Archwiki very much & think it’s more helpful than forum threads or blogposts cluttered over the web. I don’t think the Jolla wiki, while being open for edit on Github, is a good place to cover device problems and suggestions. It also has a bit of an entry hurdle.

So I decided to evaluate several wiki softwares and ended up with Bookstack.

Why Bookstack?

Before doing my research, I would have settled on MediaWiki. But it’s not beginner-friendly. I then tried Wiki.js and Bookstack. Bookstack stood out as by far the most simple to use. It provides image, tabular and reference capabilities which is sufficient for a tutorial wiki. It has both a WYSIWYG and a Markdown editor. The Book/Chapter/Article concept fits well for tutorials. I hope you like my choice, but feel free to tell what you miss or can’t find.

Bookstack docs: Docs · BookStack

Structure

I’m not as finished as I’d like with the first thing I’d submit, but you can already see what structure I’d imagined. Problem description → multiple options to solve it.

Future Plans

Currently I’m running this by myself. I hope that the proposed community nonprofit can take ownership.

Becoming an Editor

You should be able to just sign up after email confirmation. Please write an email to oskar AT oskar MINUS roesler DOT de if you encounter problems receiving the email.

21 Likes
#2

I appreciate the idea, and a “full-blown” wiki is a good addition to the forum - but there needs to be structure and logic in it. Otherwise it can end up being a heap of articles and finding information can be just as difficult. The wiki should only contain “solutions”, so it should distill the information quite a bit!

However, I find it a little “invasive” to just copy forum posts into the wiki; I’d rather see the post creators themselves writing the articles in there; this is at least what I intend to do with regards to the solutions I came up with.

I guess the best way is to start writing articles and see how it goes :slight_smile:

Edit: I have experience with Mediawiki, and it’s indeed not beginner friendly. I see Markdown support, which is great! WYSIWYG is a needed feature, too!

4 Likes
#3

It’s great for a start and as you said, let’s see what will come out from it.
I think @direc85 has a point worrying about organization of the data but it’s the beginning and yeah just copy paste forum is bad idea, it needs to be super clean and super simple imho.

#4

Thank you much @oroesler , hope it’ll grow! :+1:

#5

As a basic level user, whose capabilities are very limited, this seems like one of the most interesting projects around SFOS at the moment! A well-constructed wiki has the potential to spread awareness of SFOS and therefore, I believe a mention of this project would fit well in this topic: [Strategies] Bringing more sailors to SFOS.

I ended up running SFOS as my daily driver, because I happened to know the right person who was eager to introduce me to the system. In a more ideal scenario a potential user is able to find all the necessary information easily online to make a well considered decision.

I really like the way MediaWiki presents information, but I do admit it is a bit too time-consuming to use at first. Of course, the structure and the content of the wiki ultimately decices what would be the best platform for SFOS wiki.

Visiting ArcWiki is a good place to start in my opinion, even though our needs aren’t 100% identical. What I like about it is one can immediately find answers to the most usual questions regarding the operating system: what it consists of, what to expect and how it differentiates from other operating systems. This kind of information should be on top of the hierarchy in my opinion, because it serves the widest audience: users and potential users. I know people are anxiously waiting to read and write interesting and helpful tutorials, but I want to stress the value of of the basics as well.

When the structure has been kind of sorted, I would like to contribute to the project some way. Can’t wait for what the future holds!

2 Likes
#6

There is an existing wiki thread with links here about xyz functionality - you can get a lot of content from there, and also add some.

2 Likes
#7

I’ve now done a template page, as requested. Also I started creating instructions on how to submit content: Bookstack Manual (the ... | SailfishOS community wiki
I also created a playground book, where anyone can play with invisible chapters.

No, because the search of Bookstack is so much better than the one of Discourse. Obviously, that’s a low bar, but the in-text search works well and also the results UI is very readable. Wikipedia is a heavily linked heap, too, still it’s not unorganised. Still the (Shelve->)Book->(Chapter->)Page concept brings in the structure you may want by itself. It’s still important to write the preparations into the articles and link to their instruction if they exist, to catch users jumping right in.

A good thing about Bookstack is, that things are easily moveable & appendable. Merging and resturing should be a bit easier thx to that.

Otherwise I’d like to know what you specifically imagine as a structure while considering the existant layout.

I also tought about a welcome page, but I’m really unsure how it can be beneficial in any way.

#8

It’s been a while, but, discussion on IRC brought up the question of the HADK how-to’s and faqs. I’m thinking of taking a crack at that. I assume everybody is really excited :wink:

Edit: I’ve started transferring the HADK faq pdf. And there is a dump of Etherpad

I need to add clear references to the github repos, etc, etc.

4 Likes
#9

I just noticed one, slightly annoying thing. I explicitly did not structure the hadk-faq as ‘chapters’ of the book since that can be a pain when you’re referencing it while working. Because it’s long, it looks like the ‘Page navigation’ doesn’t work after you’ve reached the end of the visible window.

Otherwise, I really like the software!

EDIT: quick fix for the Navigation:

}
article, aside, details, figcaption, figure, footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, section {
  display: inline;
}

instead of display: block; Ideally it should be set on: id=“sidebar”

1 Like
#10

It looks like it, but if you scroll the navigation, it does work. So not sure if the upstream would sees this as a bug. But agree it’s confusing and fixed it. Since the aside container is below the sidebar div, I had to do aside { display: inline; }, though.

Edit: Did I misunderstood you and you actually encountered Sidebar scrolling difficult and inconsistent at mid-range sceen size breakpoints · Issue #4394 · BookStackApp/BookStack · GitHub during editing?

#11

Hmmm. I can’t scroll them separately. On my main monitor, if I scroll to 7 in the HADK-Faq document, the navigation does nothing. I cannot ‘select’ navigation to scroll it. So I’m not sure what you mean with scroll the navigation? If I scroll to the end of the document, then the navigation scrolls.

That issue does seems like the same issue. I tried the ‘fix’ and that did not work. It’s a bit of catch-22 since opening dev tools in a browser get’s:

  .tri-layout-left {
    position: sticky;

which will ensure that the top of the navigation bar remains in place while the content area scrolls down. disable that and the navigation scrolls, but is no longer visible fairly quickly. I’m not sure if this can be fixed with CSS. Debugging with the dev tool bar is tricky :slight_smile: The media rule, I think is:

@media screen and (min-width: 1000px)and (max-width: 1400px) {
  .tri-layout-left {
    /*! position:sticky; */top:16px;
    /*! float: ; */
  }
}

In any case, I can’t find a reliable way to both track the current position without js.

My instinct tells me to add id’s to the headings so you can align on those.

#12

That’s caused by the custom style I applied. Remove Inline stylesheet #3, that’s the custom CSS rules I applied, in the browser devtools and you can scroll it separately again.

#13

Ok, I saw it. If I get some time, I’ll try to come up with a ‘navigation’ entry aligns to ‘header’ css, but I think it requires ‘intervention’ at the template level.