wiki conventions for language constructs

[Bruce Esrig <esrig-ia@esrig.com>]

The DITA Learning Content Subcommittee has been experimenting with ways to 
work collaboratively on new and specialized language constructs.

We've been finding that capturing our understanding in wiki pages, both 
during working sessions and between working sessions, is an effective way 
to crystallize our discussions. We would welcome feedback on what we've 
done so far and suggestions for how to improve the information that we 
capture and the form in which we capture it.

In the wiki (http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/LearningSubcommittee), we have 
set aside a set of pages 
(http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/LearningContent/Structure) that record our 
progress so far. Under Results, you can see that some of our discoveries 
are about information types and some are about information structures. The 
"information types - conceptual design" is heavy on information type ideas, 
and you might think that those would translate directly into structures, 
but the translation is not necessarily direct.

The most detailed presentation is in the "Technical details ... (green 
table)" page. The green table is reverse engineered from a published DTD 
that was describing some work that was done in a DB2 pilot. Keep in mind 
that the language details in that DTD are only at a pilot level of 
development. But the format of the table is one possible way to capture DTD 
details in a wiki.

Please respond to this thread with your suggestions for how to create a set 
of wiki pages that can serve as a basis for collaboration on new or 
specialized constructs.

Note that there is really only one big wiki for the DITA TC and its 
subcommittees. If you'd like to create sample wiki pages, please connect to 
them from http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/Specializations. You can imitate 
the structural and naming conventions that are in use in the DITA Learning 
Content wiki. We've been trying to impose some systematic structure both in 
the page URLs and the use of Related pages information in the page itself. 
But since it's a wiki, the page URLs might end up being arbitrary. In that 
case, we'll build an intro page like 
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/LearningContent/Structure that points to 
the relevant pages and puts them into context.

Best wishes,

Bruce Esrig