User talk:Hlangos

Wow, somebody made my a sysop?? :-) Thanks... I'll try not to screw up everything (at once).

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Thanks for the clarification about Tai Hui.

No worries. It was my fault.

I thought I'd also say a quick hello as I've noticed that the bulk of edits seem to be by you, CityK and I.

Might seem so but I mostly mucked around with pages that are not yet widely linked.

I thought I'd also take this opportunity to ask what you think about the current state of the wiki in general and whether you think there are areas that could do with some attention.

I havn't seen a lot of the wiki yet. So my view might be a little biased. Mostly I think the wiki grew without a lot of structure and then the merge made a mess of the structures that began to appear. That's why I really appreciate the work you've done by categorizing hundreds of pages. Also adding all those links should help people who want to contribute their knowledge to add it in one place without lots of duplicate entries that are impossible to keep up to date.

CityK advised me that some sort of graphics for stubs etc. would be useful. I'm still mulling this over as I don't really trust my graphics skills. My girlfriend's an artist, so I'll ask her what she thinks.

I am not much of a graphics person neither.

It occurred to me that several chipset and device manufacturers have either been bought out, gone out of business or been rebranded. I think it would be useful if the relevant pages (Chipset vendors, DVB-T PCI Devices, etc.) reflected this but I really wanted a second opinion before I start changing things. The chipset vendor page is probably the most straightforward to change because of its length and the fact that the users of this page will probably have at least some technical knowledge.

I'd say go ahead. If you are unsure about the changes, put a mockup/sample on the associated talk page and send me the link.

Users of the wiki can be split into three broad categories:

1. Users looking for buying advice.
2. Users looking for a way to make their existing devices work in Linux.
3. Developers looking for any relevant info they might need for driver/application development.

I reordered them in (what I think) is the order of the depth of detail they seek. The first ones need low detail but on lots of devices. The second group needs more detail on one or very few devices. The last one needs lots of details.

So, I pose the following question: Could the wiki take account of these user-types more elegantly? I certainly think that the information regarding the exact nature of support available in Linux could do with some distillation. http://hardware4linux.info/ uses a five-step rating system from unsupported to fully supported. Could we implement something similar? I can see that the task of standardizing the wiki is not a small one, but it'll be much easier if there's a systematic approach. I'd certainly value any input from you.

I am all for standards. I've put some time into standardizing and concentrating the information about USB DVB-T Devices here. and I hope there is a way to extend the approach to other parts of the wiki too. As you pointed out the users are a diverse bunch and they come with different needs. In order to serve them all we need to have some way of filtering/tagging the information. So that we can show different degrees of detail to different users (or on different pages) without duplicating all the data.

Cheers -henrik