Intro

This was a rough attempt to determine how to map the current c.l.c faq into a wiki format. All of the experimental pages have now been deleted since the content is not under GNU FDL and was not intended to be permanent. The explanation below is left for historical purposes.

Should this site end up hosting a wiki version of the c.l.c faq, this category page will likely be a main entry point.

Historical Notes

This part of the wiki only contains fragments of the FAQ as a demonstration. There are problems with doing it this way that mean it is probably best to use a simple approach of one page per section and not transcluding content at all. The problems are discussed after the description.

The structuring works as follows:

1. The wording of each question is stored in a page named [[Q X.Y]] where X is the FAQ section number and Y is the question number within that section.
2. Each FAQ is stored in a page named [[FAQ X.Y]]. This contains an inline of the question wording as described above, followed by a section break and the wording of the answer. i.e. the URL/wiki link does not contain mention of the wording of the question itself, only its numbering
3. This category (the one whose description section you're reading) contains sub-categories for each FAQ section.
4. Each FAQ section category contains references to the FAQ questions of (2) above. As already noted, these references don't include the wording of the question, so for browsing convenience, an index is provided and subcategorised within the section category page:
5. An index page listing all FAQ section index pages and full FAQ section pages is also linked to from this category
6. The index page for each section provides the same service as the section category page however its links provide the full wording of the question by inlining (1) above
7. Finally a full page for each FAQ section is referenced by both the section index and category. This full page inlines each FAQ (2) that belongs in the section, and separates them by wiki sections named X.Y. These get converted into html anchors so that e.g. question 1.4 can be referred to as http://clc.flash-gordon.me.uk/mediawiki/index.php/FAQ_Full_Section_1_Declarations_and_Initializations#1.4. The drawback to this approach is that the auto-generated page index doesn't contain the question wording, only its number.

One problem with transcluding pages is that currently the wiki doesn't automatically update pages in which the material is transcluded when the transcluded material changes. This may be a caching issue or it may just be a bug. The workaround is to edit the page(s) in which the transclusion occurs, add meaningless whitespace and resave it. The other problem with transclusion is that when full-text searching, only the transcluded page is returned in the results, not the page(s) in which it is transcluded.

Another problem is that anything other than the most simple of transclusion markup is buggy or unreliable. This means that markup like == 1.1 {{:Q 1.1}} == doesn't produce a header with "1.1 Q1.1 wording" as the text. So on full section pages with more than 4 questions, the page contents index auto-generated by the wiki will contain only the question numbers and not the wording of questions. Also on the section index pages, it's not possible to reliably generate a link that includes the question wording, since the markup: [[FAQ 1.1|1.1 {{:Q 1.1}}]] produces inconsistent results - sometimes it works and other times it doesn't.