thoughts

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+The pages in the basewiki should be fully self-documenting as far as what
+users need to know to edit pages in the wiki. [[HelpOnFormatting]]
+documents the basics, but doesn't include every preprocessor directive.
+
+Note that there's a disctinction between being self-documenting for users,
+and being complete documentation for ikiwiki. The basewiki is _not_
+intended to be the latter, so it lacks the usage page, all the plugin
+pages, etc.
+
+I've made some progress toward making the basewiki self-documenting by moving
+the docs about using templates, shortcuts, and blogs from the plugin pages, 
+onto the pages in the basewiki.
+
+Here are some of the things that are not documented in full in the
+basewiki:
+
+       joey@kodama:~/src/ikiwiki/doc/plugins>grep usage *
+       aggregate.mdwn:## usage
+       graphviz.mdwn:page.  Example usage:
+       graphviz.mdwn:amounts of processing time and disk usage.
+       img.mdwn:## usage
+       linkmap.mdwn:set of pages in the wiki. Example usage:
+       map.mdwn:This plugin generates a hierarchical page map for the wiki. Example usage:
+       postsparkline.mdwn:# usage
+       sparkline.mdwn:# usage
+       sparkline.mdwn:more detail in [its wiki](http://sparkline.wikispaces.com/usage).
+       table.mdwn:## usage
+
+Meta is another one.
+
+The holdup on documenting these in full in the basewiki is that I'm not sure
+where to put the docs. [[HelpOnFormatting]] should stay as simple as possible
+and just give examples, not full lists of availavle parameters, etc. And
+it's bad enough that [[blog]] uses that toplevel namespace, without adding
+lots more toplevel pages to the basewiki. ([[blog]] really needs to be moved..
+I have several wikis that override it with their actual blog content).
+
+Maybe the thing to do would be to make a meta/ or usage/ or wiki/ or something
+directory in the basewiki, and put new pages documenting how to use preprocesor
+directives in there.
+
+Actually, if we look at the basewiki contents:
+
+       blog.mdwn@              pagespec.mdwn@               subpage@
+       favicon.ico@            preprocessordirective.mdwn@  subpage.mdwn@
+       helponformatting.mdwn@  sandbox.mdwn@                templates/
+       index.mdwn@             shortcuts.mdwn@              templates.mdwn@
+       local.css@              smileys@                     wikiicons@
+       markdown.mdwn@          smileys.mdwn@                wikilink.mdwn@
+       openid.mdwn@            style.css@
+
+Most of this is meta stuff. Only index.mdwn, local.css, favicon.ico,
+smileys, wikiicons, shortcuts, and templates are really content/configs that
+are used as the base of a wiki. The rest is documentation.
+
+Moving a lot of these pages could be hard though.. Lots of wikis probably
+link to them. Maybe the directory they're moved to could be in the search
+path, like the userdir is, so that simple links keep working.
+
+See also: [[Conditional_Underlay_Files]]