Reworking the wiki structure

One of the things I explored when I had a clean slate to start with on
http://www.postgresqldocs.org was how to organize the information there in
a way that I thought would be easy to navigate for the typical person
looking for help. I'm ready now start moving content from there onto the
new wiki, now that it's got everthing I look for in a working environment.
I like would like to reorganize the site a bit while I'm doing that anyway
and wanted to pass along my thinking here for feedback before I start.

Here is what I'd like to do to the main page (which is locked for editing
so I can't touch it myself in any case):

-Remove the TOC using __NOTOC__ This page isn't long enough to justify it
and it's just wasting vertical space.

-Put the "User Documentation" section first. Always start with what the
typical user is looking for. "Alternate Languages" right before is good,
the French section has aleady filled out nicely and we should encourage
those.

-The "User Accounts" and "General Information" are the least important
thing on the page; they should all go to the very bottom. Potential
contributors can scroll a bit, they are vastly outnumbered by readers who
the page should be optimized for.

-"Security Information and Strategies" is taking up vertical space on this
critical page for a single article. Remove that and put a reference into
the "Community Generated" section instead (that's fairly old info at this
point anyway).

-Move everything listed in "Developer & Contributor Resources" section
into a seperate page. Again, something like 10 lines of space used up for
something that most visitors have no interest in whatsoever, and by having
it on the main page it's also locked content. The only think there worth
keeping on the main page is a recommendation for #postgresql which is good
advice for users. I'd even suggest adding an additional comment telling
people to use ??<topic> to reach the docbot.

Next up is the "Community Generated Articles, Guides, and Documentation"
section. The 22 sections here are difficult to navigate in this one long
page. On the postgresqldocs.org site I grouped these into five sections
instead:

-Getting Started with PostgreSQL
-Frequently Asked Questions
-Administration and Maintenance
-Development
-Performance Tuning

The "Getting Started" page included a mix of what's covered in "Detailed
installation guides" and some other sections. The rest are pretty self
explanatory.

What I would like to do is a similar mapping for the "Community Generated"
documents here. Take the existing 22 sections and push them into the
appropriate category here (possibly more than one, particularly for FAQs
which I ended regularly mapping into two spots). The 5 categories I used
before won't quite be enough, but it will be way less than 22.

You might argue that will add another click and level of site organization
people have to navigate. Well, it won't, and here's why: once that's
done, and the entry page slimming job is complete, these section
categories can go into the front page. There will be few enough of them
to fit there right at the top, and instead of "Community Generated
Articles, Guides, and Documentation" you'll get categories of information
to sort through instead. Much friendlier.

That's what I'm thinking so far. Going to be a week until I can actually
do the main content migration, so plenty of time to chew over the
suggestions I bring up here before I will touch anything.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD