NEAR Wiki - Reorganisation & Update - Request for Feedback

Happy Friday!

Chiming in with an update on the NEAR Wiki Development Plan.

NEAR Wiki Development Plan - Feedback Requested! Development

What’s the update here?

Reorgonisation

The NEAR Wiki organisation has been completely overhauled and pushed to the wiki.near.org

The goal of the reorganisation was to make the Wiki simpler to navigate, less cluttered, and more concise.

Old Layout

NEARVerse Portal | NEAR Wiki - Old Format

Find tools, connections and resources to journey through the NEARVerse.

New Layout

Hello from NEAR Wiki | NEAR Wiki

Description will go into a meta tag in

Please do take a moment or two to check the new layout out and let us know what feedback you guys have.

Personas

Originally, we were setting out to organise the Wiki in ‘personas’, so dedicated routes for developers, community members, and NEAR holders.

We’ve reflected that somewhat with a more simplified version. Now, the Wiki is organised into the following categories:

Something missing? Let us know! We’re on track to making the NEAR Wiki the go-to source for information in the NEAR Ecosystem.

David_NEAR:

Something missing? Let us know! We’re on track to making the NEAR Wiki the go-to source for information in the NEAR Ecosystem.

Good morning. Looks awesome

Glad to hear it, thank you!

Hi @David_NEAR ,

Thanks for driving this effort, it’s definitely important to make wiki into a powerful onboarding tool.

First question - is this already migrated to Docusaurus? Currently it still says there “Powered by GitBook” while NEAR Wiki Development Plan - Feedback Requested! says the migration will be done by Nov 22.

TLDR: I find current structure very confusing and really hard to find information. Some information is missing. Links are broken. Content has typos.

Starting from landing page:

Screen Shot 2021-12-05 at 1.15.27 PM1650×656 51.9 KB

Previously we had explanation of what is NEAR, why NEAR and some major directions to go next to explore Wiki.
Right now it has almost no information and super unclear where to go from here.

The sections like “Create and Learn” doesn’t really make sense to me.
Section like “Community” would make sense only later after I already familiarized myself with NEAR, not as a first thing.

Going 3 level in to just get a link make no sense to me.

Screen Shot 2021-12-05 at 1.17.00 PM2358×988 156 KB

At least provide information that person can read vs linking to external docs and blogs. People have come to Wiki and would like to get the summary of everything here.

Generally, I would prefer to reduce level of depth to max 2.

I personally liked way more having major sections with visible subsections under them vs ones that open - meaning I need to click on stuff to find what is there (because names of sections like aspirational Learn is not very clear). I’m ok if there is a clear study we have that this structure is better though.

For https://wiki.near.org/general/overview/near-token/token-balance – unclear why are we actually showing the RPC request to the user? I would not expect people reading Wiki know what this means.

Instead bringing more information to https://wiki.near.org/general/overview/near-token and removing extra indirection doing it would be great.

Similarly just bring main info into https://wiki.near.org/validators-and-staking/validators vs creating a separate indirection and require extra click. Plus this page right now linking to non existing pages. Also this info (validator economics, hardware, etc) should be on the wiki in the first place anyway.

There is no Stake Wars right now. It’s a different program. https://wiki.near.org/validators-and-staking/about#stake-wars-testnet

Also it’s worth improving the titles of pages , as they currently show up just as “About” for links like https://wiki.near.org/validators-and-staking/about#stake-wars-testnet

Generally, I agree on reducing the number of sections to way lower than what happened before. From my perspective:

• General: covering everything from why NEAR, basics of NEAR like account model and token, and any other FAQ people have,
• Engage (what ways engage with NEAR: guilds, projects, education, etc. This is where will be a guide how to start a project on NEAR, and what are ways to leverage NF, legal considerations and etc.
• Technology (this starts with how NEAR works and goes into how things are built, research and more),
• Validators (fixing content but otherwise is fine) and

“NF Public Docs” section makes little sense to me here. It’s content should go into one of the sections above. The reality that projects don’t really care about NF - they care about their success so that content should live in sections of how projects will be successful.

Hey!

illia:

First question - is this already migrated to Docusaurus? Currently it still says there “Powered by GitBook” while NEAR Wiki Development Plan - Feedback Requested! says the migration will be done by Nov 22.

Not yet, I should have made this update more clear:

NEAR Wiki Development Plan - Feedback Requested!

This week - Synch with James on the migration to Docusaurus. Once the Wiki is aligned on Gitbook, migrating to Docusaurus is straightforward.

illia:

Previously we had explanation of what is NEAR, why NEAR and some major directions to go next to explore Wiki.

These disappeared due to the Gitbook update and are unrecoverable. James is building them again.

illia:

Some information is missing. Links are broken. Content has typos.

The content isn’t finalised and, for the most part, has been crowdsourced from elsewhere. I’m going to sweep through the Wiki and update/flag content after we’ve got the structure down.

illia:

At least provide information that person can read vs linking to external docs and blogs. People have come to Wiki and would like to get the summary of everything here.

Absolutely! Will be aiming to minimise external links.

illia:

I personally liked way more having major sections with visible subsections under them vs ones that open - meaning I need to click on stuff to find what is there (because names of sections like aspirational Learn is not very clear). I’m ok if there is a clear study we have that this structure is better though.

I don’t have any data to back up the reasoning as to why I moved forward with this restructure, other than anecdotal evidence. Those I’ve spoken to are in agreement that the formatting here:

The hub for those interested in learning, building, or running a node on...

Is much simpler to follow than the old Wiki layout:

NEARVerse Portal | NEAR Wiki - Old Format

Find tools, connections and resources to journey through the NEARVerse.

illia:

For Token Balance - NEAR Wiki – unclear why are we actually showing the RPC request to the user? I would not expect people reading Wiki know what this means.

For sure, and just to reiterate, there was no additional content added/amended in this restructure. It was formatting only.

illia:

Generally, I agree on reducing the number of sections to way lower than what happened before. From my perspective:

• General: covering everything from why NEAR, basics of NEAR like account model and token, and any other FAQ people have,
• Engage (what ways engage with NEAR: guilds, projects, education, etc. This is where will be a guide how to start a project on NEAR, and what are ways to leverage NF, legal considerations and etc.
• Technology (this starts with how NEAR works and goes into how things are built, research and more),
• Validators (fixing content but otherwise is fine) and

Makes sense but I think it might look overcrowded if we reduce the categories and reduce the max level of depth to 2. Will gladly test it out though

illia:

“NF Public Docs” section makes little sense to me here. It’s content should go into one of the sections above. The reality that projects don’t really care about NF - they care about their success so that content should live in sections of how projects will be successful.

So this one was a tricky one. I’ve siloed that information because it doesn’t really seem to fit within any other category and I wanted to mitigate the risk that we confuse users.

For example:

https://wiki.near.org/near-foundation-public-docs/people-team/humans-at-near-foundation/expenses/home-office-equipment-and-technology

How relevant is this to the average NEAR Wiki user?

I’m all for the open and transparent nature of information sharing within NEAR, but I fear that if we pile all internal documents into it we risk diluting more relevant information for NEAR Community Members.

David_NEAR:

These disappeared due to the Gitbook update and are unrecoverable. James is building them again.

You can find them here: wiki/README.md at 6add31877c3f0e780ffa2efb6f33f4c6d6080ccb · near/wiki · GitHub or wiki/README.md at 3237758be44dcdbf8e1c066e4a9730d658a98523 · near/wiki · GitHub for older content and overall in the history of github.

David_NEAR:

How relevant is this to the average NEAR Wiki user?

Agree, this means that information that is for NF people and not relevant to Wiki user, it should be in a separate place instead of in the place where we want most people to go.

I see bunch of stuff like templates for projects going to specific sections in Wiki and sections specific to NF personnel and operations - going to separate NF wiki.

illia:

You can find them here: wiki/README.md at 6add31877c3f0e780ffa2efb6f33f4c6d6080ccb · near/wiki · GitHub or wiki/README.md at 3237758be44dcdbf8e1c066e4a9730d658a98523 · near/wiki · GitHub for older content and overall in the history of github.

Thank you!

illia:

I see bunch of stuff like templates for projects going to specific sections in Wiki and sections specific to NF personnel and operations - going to separate NF wiki.

Agree, 100% - basically move the internal info that’s on Notion to a NF focused Wiki

@illia Thanks for all this great feedback! What do you think about using thewiki.io as a community-driven wiki, alongside our GitBook?

Folks, this need to be fixed ASAP.

Please rollback to the old structure if you can’t fix it right now.

Hey, I don’t seem to have the rollback functionality.

Do you or @jlwaugh ?

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