Wiki Guidelines Strawman

Owned by Scot Steele
Last updated: Jun 02, 2022
2 min read

LFN Open-source Wiki Guidelines Strawman

Categories of Documents

There are two categories of documents that should be stored in the wiki for LFN open-source projects. These are:

  • Reference materials - documents that provide information about projects and events.

  • Point in time documents - meeting agendas/minutes, and collaboration projects, and other forms of documents that have a limited lifespan.

Both types of Wiki documents should be considered as non-permanent or transient in nature. Eventually they will be archived or deleted.

Lifecycle Considerations

The lifecycle of wiki documents should be considered one of the important aspects of wiki maintenance.

Each community should consider lifecycle as part of the guidelines of the information stored in the wiki. We suggest that each community develop their own set of lifecycle guidelines using the LFN recommendations.

  • For example, a specific project description and or definition documentation would have a life cycle of the project life and would be archived at the conclusion of the project. Another example could be meeting minutes. The community would likely benefit from retaining all of the meeting minutes for a given year and archiving those meeting minutes at the end of the year.

Suggested lifecycles for some of the document types:

  • Agendas/Meeting minutes – At the conclusion of the Project’s year (generally the Calendar year)

  • Reference materials (Guides/overviews/How-tos) – End of useful life

  • Project Documentation - at the conclusion of the project

  • Collaboration workstreams/projects – End of useful life

Document Map

To assist locating documents and information in the most efficient manner, a document map could be provided within the wiki. The document map should sit at the top of the wiki hierarchy and provide high level descriptions of the type of information found in each of the folders in the wiki.

The Page tree can provide this map; however, the community must manage the Tree. 

Wiki Maintenance

The community as a whole is responsible for maintaining the content within the wiki. Each person that creates documents should accept ownership of the maintenance and lifecycle of that document or series of documents. To assist the community members with the maintenance tasks, we recommend one to two members of the community act as part of the LFN Doc Evangelist team by performing periodic reviews of wiki pages in the context of document Life cycle.