I'd be happy to help, i feel i am quite artistic and also very good at formatting/editing info into concise, simplistic language.

I notice there is a lot of 'clutter' on the wiki, e.g. I re-wrote the DVB page a long while ago. I was not too keen to delete all the jargon that was there before me so I left it at the bottom as "for those using older versions of KM". This relates to KM R4V5! Surely no-one needs this anymore and therefore this is unnecessarily causing clutter, in any case I'm sure the original info is in the forum archives.

In fact, in the meantime, since then all the stuff I wrote at the top is quite outdated since R5A22 was the latest thing at the time. Having all this outdated info can easily contradict information on the forum and/or just send you on a wild goose chase and generally confuse the hell out of people. In any case I've given it a little tidy up just now.

Basically the biggest problem with the wiki as I see it is the content rather than the design. I say this because I think the wiki should be the 1st point of reference for any questions. Perhaps you could assemble a team of 'wiki moderators' who after every official release of KM go through designated areas in the wiki tidying it all up, clearly KM is developing at such a fast rate that you guys spearheading the development need people to walk behind you dusting up the mess. I'd happily keep on top of all the info relating to DVB-T / frontend / UK users.

I was also thinking that the wiki could host example video downloads would be very helpful for newcomers to visualise what is going on. I can quite easily record the tv output of my mythbox onto an MP4 player, this is reasonably good quality and a modest size file to download. These video's could a) demonstrate how to use the interface on a fully working mythbox, complete with media files, b) demonstrate common debugging / tweaking processes,

It would be nice to figure out a way to handle this, even if it was some kind of standard way of organizing things that people could try to follow.

Here's a good example of a page that needs some serious pruning:

http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=LvmHowTo

There are various notes and references to various versions sprinkled liberally throughout. I know that people are hesitant to wipe out other people's writing, either because they don't know if they're wiping out important information (my situation with something like LVM) or out of politeness or something. But at some point a page like this needs to get a good edit to make it easier to follow once again.

I had actually been thinking about doing something like this. Sort of a video blog showing a full install then as time progresses adding video's about FAQ and interesting plugins/mods. At the time I was thinking about putting them on google video or something, but now I should have enough bandwith to handle something like that. I actually don't have the equipment and/or time right now for it, and I'm not about to allow unregulated uploads that large on the wiki, but I would be willing to upload something like that to the server for someone if they created the content.



this sounds like a good idea. of course all I can do is ask for volunteers, but having and organized list of what each person is responsible for might make people more inclined to actually do it. I know as it is I sometimes don't even bother looking as I know I don't have time to police the whole thing. I also thing we need to work on some sort of better organization, which in turn would help these designated people or anyone for that matter find the pages they need to maintain. somehow figure out "areas of commonality"

Some of this will be mandatory, anyways, as I intend on changing wiki engines since the one I am currently using is seeing really to be nice "slow" development. I think I have found one I like that is very customizable and is in active development. I really don't want a moinmoin or mediawiki looking site. I want knoppmyth to have the coolest looking most usefull wiki on the net.

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Xsecrets

video, hey X et al. What sort of ideas do you have. I do have the equipment for this sort of thing. (Happens to be one of the things I do.) Anyway, if you have some ideas, I may be willing to help create some of this more media rich content.
I did have an idea for one. One to squash the nay-sayers a bit. With my hardware test machine, the latest version of Knoppmyth installs in about 15 min flat. This gets me from boot to running system. Heck this is 1/4 the time it takes to install windows before adding all the 4000 updates. It takes at least 15 min to setup and configure BeyondTV or Meedio the last time I checked.

Just a thought, would it work for people if we organised the wiki into sections much like the forums, eg. DTV, Installation, etc.

This would give more correlation between the two sites.

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Girkers

well my initial thought was to just do basically a svideo based install like most people would do, but pipe the svid to a camera/tuner something to record the output then people have a visual account of everything you have to go through for an install. Then open up some polls or have people email me ideas and do some on additional things. problems many people have if we could duplicate them or at the time I was thinking things like mythstreamtv (of course cesman has since included it) The video would have to be decently small. I don't have the space or bandwith to host a hdtv version or anything, but we could get a decent quality mpeg4 (pick your flavor) file of an install without it being too large I think, and any follow up videos would most likely be smaller than that. The hardest part would probably be dubbing in some audio to explain things throughout the install.



This is probably a good idea, but I think we may even need more segmentation by the nature of the information. we'll need to take a look at it, but I can see things like Non-US for all the nz UK PAL type pages we have. maybe a sound section, But I do like the idea of have more structure of some sort.

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Xsecrets

I have the power and I have the technology to mix the video and audio stuff I just don't currently have the tech to capture the stuff.

More than willing to help.

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Girkers

Dude, just use your knoppmyth box. (Although granted you would need two boxes to do this). I have recorded my box in action with itself by feeding svideo out into the svideo input of my DVICO card. Works well enough to be ok once divx compressed.

Could link to the Systm Myth episode now. Is a little dated, but contains the basics.
http://revision3.com/systm/mythtv/media

Also check out what Puppy Linux is doing with flash based video tutorials using WINK, I couldn't find if WINK is opensource but the tuts are kinda nice basic and small.

http://rhinoweb.us




Agree with these points, I am hesisitant to delete anyone's info as well. But are many guides having too much clutter currently. Maybe if authors of new WIKI try to keep guide relevant to last 1 or 2 KM releases if possible. The clutter and comments was part of what I was talking about earlier in KM forum topics with each WIKI guide. A place for everyone to discuss suggestions to a guide/dig deeper and author(s) to decide appropiate content to commit. With each guide having a forum topic could also start topic with current WIKI guide and ensure backup of ideas without fear of losing important info.

Ok there is a start for a new wiki up at http://pmwiki.knoppmythwiki.org.

What I'm looking for is comments/ideas on usability particularly suggestions on the category system/structure.

Don't worry about the theme/color/logo right now that will come later.

Also don't waste a bunch of time trying to convert pages or anything this is just in a testing phase right now and I am going to wipe it clean and start fresh once I've gotten feedback and decided on a good layout/configuration.

There are a couple of pages moved over to have something to move around to. The auth system is implemented, and no it's not tied to the forums (and won't be as discussed earlier) so you'll have to create a name to edit anything. The main page is locked, so it's not a bug that you can't edit it, but anything else in the Main group should be editable.

So please hop on over kick the tires and let me know what you think.

Thanks

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Xsecrets

Can anyone make up a category? Or will there be a list of existing categories to choose from? Even if anyone can make up a category, it might be good to start out with a few choice ones. The "howto" category is an obvious one you already have in there: maybe "installation" and "hardware"? I'm not sure the "main" category is descriptive. But this will hopefully be a start at better organization.

Could one category be "legacy" or "olderversions"? That way any parts of pages not pertaining to the recent release can be saved there (the digital audio howto, for instance: the majority of it can be moved out of the current page as it's probably irrelevant to R5B7)

When you go to the index page for a category, like "howto," the left navigation bar changes.

That right-hand inset navigation bar could use a title to describe what documents are that appear in it -- I couldn't figure out if they were most recently edited, or most popular, or a hand-generated list. Also, if there were some way to have the pages appear with headings and indented from the headings, like the left-hand bar does, that would be more friendly than "main.Knoppmyth" and "category.documentation"

It looks like the old format of wiki formatting doesn't transfer over to this new wiki: there's lots of "=="s in there.

I can make you a nice KMW graphic if you'd like.

Thanks for setting this up--it really is invaluable.

Here I go with a criticism and no solution.

When a newbie comes in and reports what we think of as a common problem, they get ripped for not searching. The problem with this is, when you search, it is not easy to tell if the information you come across is relevant to the release you are running.

The great thing about knoppmyth is it gets thousands of people running the exact same release of software. Way back when I first started with knoppmyth, has it been a month already?, I wasted a lot of time trying things out that were posted in reference to a release much earlier than mine.

I'm not sure of a good way to resolve this issue. It would not make much sense to have a subsection in this forum for each release, but it would be nice to know what release a howto was relevant to. It would also be nice, if a howto became obsolete, a reference to the new howto were added, with a note of when, and why it is now obsolete.

I'm realy new to wikis, so I don't have much input on how this might be done.


All that said, the information that is currently here and on the wiki, has been a great help to me as is. Thanks guys.

mike

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KnoppMyth R5B7
Asus P4P800-VM
P4 2.4 Ghz - 1GB RAM
PVR-150 - HD-5000
Geforce FX 5200

yes and no. just adding [[!CategoryName]] to a page will create that category page, but will not add it to the main category page. I was wanting to get a good list here so that we can have them in place and just not tell people they can create new ones.

The "Main" link is not actually a category, but a Group, It doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of the wiki because there is basically only one group "Main" I will probably create a second group for archive/historical for pages that no longer apply. Anyway after the long explanation I cannot remove it from the category page it is dynamic.


see my above post. I plan on using a separate "group" to handle this.
then once you choose a category you'll see something like


yes I'm aware of that and I am going to fix it. I really haven't decided if I want to use that feature or just have them all the same. The reason I haven't changed it is I don't want to loose and have to look back up all the links that are on the one it changes to, as that documentation is very usefull to me in configuring everything. It will certainly be removed before the site goes live. (no need to encourage everyone to know too much.)

I can add a title. and it is recently changed pages. I may need to play with that formating a bit more. I don't think I can to the same as the left bar, but I might can I don't know I'll just need to look at it. I had the whole recent changes like on the old wiki, but like on the old wiki it would wrap to two lines and became difficult to read.

that is correct. I've isolated some of the major things that change, and when I do the largescale conversion I will make those changes, but there will have to be a concerted effort at that point in time if I can get some volunteers (were not there yet I'll let you know) to check for markup that didn't translate, and to catagorize the pages.

I do want a new graphic, I don't want you or anyone else to look at any color scheme you may see on the wiki right now to base the graphic on. I'm not sure which way to go. If someone creates a really good graphic then we can base the site color scheme off that, otherwise it might be better to work on the color scheme we want first then create the graphic from there.

If anyone wants to start working on one the current limit is approx 150px width so that it fits in the left nav bar, otherwise it looks real goofy when you start scrolling a long page.

I'm just glad that it could be of use to some people, and that the community has added enough content to make it usefull.

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Xsecrets

This has been mentioned a few times. As I stated in my last post I do plan on having a "group" for completely deprecated pages, however I don't think this is really a complete solution. The problem is that I'm somewhat at a loss for a "good" solution. If anyone has ideas about this (that work within our context I'm not writing a whole new web platform to fix this issue. ) please post them here for discussion. I would love to find an elegant, maintainable solution to this, if possible.

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Xsecrets

Definitely need a troubleshooting category for common problems like "black screen!" or "only snow". Also maybe an install/upgrade distinction?

When you mark a page for category membership can you add a description? That's the first thing I missed looking at the auto-generated list of HowTo pages.

I'd fold the FAQ into the wiki as it's own category. Can you restrict editing access by category? One of the first new FAQs would be some very clear rules about what goes in what category, and how to decide if there's any doubt.

Why everyone and their cousin has to reinvent wiki markup so that they're all different always mystifies me... It almost always comes down to NIBM, and I really hate having to learn new markup conventions...