Wiki engine for documentation

Community Offtopic
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I still find Frappe framework and ErpNext still weak when it comes to documentation; big part of that falls on us as community to contribute especially for non hardcore developers like myself can help the community by polishing the documentation and translate it to other languages, but also I think part of the problem is caused by the current style of the documentation platform. I don’t think github is the best way to contribute and collaborate on updating the documentation.

There should be a wiki engine used for Documentation and Collaborative Authoring, and there will be numerous advantages for adapting such wiki style:

  • Wikis offer a simple syntax and markup, and most wikis have a “formatting help” link for guidance. no need for Github complication especially for non developers.
  • No special tooling for contributors. All you need is a web browser and account.
  • Version control built in, so can easily roll back an edit
  • “Talk” pages, allowing for meta discussion
  • Easy to grow translations page by page
  • A simpler way to authorize and control edits
    and the list goes on and on …

I really urge frappe team to adapt wiki style for documentation. if you want contributions from many people—especially the less technical contributors—a wiki is a good choice. It is the de facto for most open source projects

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Technically there are three wikis already, but nobody uses them much. I’ve actually been trying to clean them up a bit when I can.

Granted, these wikis aren’t as feature rich as mediawiki or one of the others, but it’s a start.

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You are right, I was talking exactly about something like MediaWiki. Github wiki is good for the team use not really that good for wide community collaboration and contributing especially when comes to ease of editing, approving, discussion, talk, and notes on edits, and translations. So wiki can serve documentation for manual and developing and also your not restricted to linear format. I see lots of sources and documentation but they are all over the place in different github wikis and in frappe and erpnext sites, so Maybe first step is to bring everything together in one centralize MediaWiki. I’m willing to contribute lots of my time to bring documentation together.

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I’m willing to invest some time in this as well, I’ve found alot of the documentation to be scattershot myself. Looking for information can be a real pain.

@rmehta What do you say, would you be willing to put up a wiki?

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The docs are already in GitHub and the part of the repo.

This is as good as a wiki IMO and very easy to update, edit and also looks good :slight_smile:

https://github.com/frappe/erpnext/tree/develop/erpnext/docs
https://github.com/frappe/frappe/tree/develop/frappe/docs

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I followed the links above and they send me to something that is not easy to understand as a person who does not write code.
Also there are screenshots but seeing a screen does not explain it.

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@rmehta maybe something like this would work for people. http://realms.io. it seams to be middle grounds