Help:Concept
Structure
The content in this wiki is separated by topic in a couple of groups called namespaces. Most prominently the Main namespace (with no prefix) for the presentation of the latest openSUSE Distribution, think of it as the product brochure, for people who are new to openSUSE and maybe to Linux in general. The support database's SDB: namespace for people who have a problem with the openSUSE distribution and seek written instruction on how to solve it. And the openSUSE community's openSUSE: namespace to collaboratively write on documentation for their projects and teams. With this structure of the content we ensure that this wiki is only used for what it's good for.
Navigation happens through means common to any wiki, but there are also portals. Portals are entry points for a specific topic, similar to the main page. They provide an overview over a topic and guide readers to the content they seek which is either another portal or an individual article. Also categorization is very important for our wiki navigation as it makes possible to automatically generate overview pages and navigational structures. With these rules for navigation we ensure that our readers find the content we produce.
Styling
Styling of content happens through templates. There are two kinds, templates for a specific kind of article like the general article template, the one for Portals or for support database articles and templates for styling of recurring content in articles like introduction and info boxes, hints and instructions or external sources and items. With these rules about styling we ensure that people understand the content we produce.
Quality assurance
Prominent namespaces in this wiki are subject to a quality assurance (QA) process to ensure articles meet the required quality. This QA process happens via a system which provides the opportunity to have several revisions of articles in parallel and one approved by the Wiki team. It does not limit creation of new content, but allows only quality content to be shown by default. With this process we ensure that first time visitors get drawn into page and stay.
Translation
Important part of our concept is that wiki content must be accessible to people that can't use English to read or contribute to the articles. We have multiple wiki translation projects running and we will add more when openSUSE communities using different languages are strong enough to perform the translation and later continue with a regular wiki maintenance.
We are working on this multilingual wiki that can be used to start initial translation of mandatory articles in order to create translated wikis, or to translate only few articles. See more in Portal:Translation.