docs: order the sidebar as a walk, then a set of references

[lens0021]

MediaWiki:Sidebar is the reading order as well as the menu — Module:Sequence reads it to build the prev/next row on every page (#487) — so its order is the order the documentation is read in, and it had never been chosen as one. It was the order the pages happened to be written in.

The order

Docs — Installation, Getting Started, Pages, Images, Skins, Searching, Extensions, Lua modules, JavaScript, Translating, Editing sidebar, Deploying, Troubleshooting

References — Limitations, Why wikitext, Configuration, Standalone binary, Commands, Writing an extension, Development, Licenses

Docs is one walk: get the tool, build something, author it, shape the site, extend it, translate it, publish it, fix it.

What moved, and why

Why wikitext led the whole thing. It argues wikitext against Markdown, which is a question a reader has before installing anything rather than a step they walk — and the front page now makes that argument itself, citing Why wikitext and Limitations together as its two read-more links. Both are appendices to the landing page, so both are in References, and they stay a pair.

Searching moves up beside Skins. It needs a skin to mount its typeahead, and both Extensions and Skins pointed forward to it from above; those two references now point backwards.

Editing sidebar moves below Skins and Translating. Two of its three sections presume translation — the labels are messages, so the Korean wording is a /ko file — and its logo and Minerva claims presume Skins. At fifth place it asked a reader who had just built a Hello World to write a Korean message file for a site with no translations, and to link pages they did not have.

Deploying ends the walk, Troubleshooting follows it, where a walk stops and lookup begins.

References opens with the two short pages the landing page hangs off it. They are also the ramp: Troubleshooting into Configuration is 78 lines into 225, and the three reference pages after it run to 557 without a break. Configuration leads those three, being the page the rest of the documentation links most — 17 of the other 20 pages link it.

Standalone binary keeps its place before Commands. Commands' examples are a bare wikven build, and it is Standalone binary that puts wikven on the PATH.

Writing an extension now precedes Development. Development sends readers to it in its opening lines, and is itself linked from nowhere else in the documentation.

The CI change

Two smoke assertions named pages that only the old order made true: that Why wikitext has no previous link, because it was first, and that Searching's next is Translating.

The ends-of-sequence assertion goes altogether. That the first page has no previous link and the last no next one is a detail of what Template:prevnext renders, and reading it back out of the built HTML is more of the docs' own furniture than a smoke check should be inspecting. What it was added for (#455) is the row being missing entirely, and the check above it already covers that — for every page the sidebar names, rather than for two of them.

The translated-label check stays, and now reads which page follows Searching from MediaWiki:Sidebar, the same place Module:Sequence reads it. It is about the label — that a link on a translated page carries the target's own translated title rather than a copy restated in the caller — so the pair it happens to use should follow the order rather than fix it.

Checked

The sidebar diff is a pure reorder — the sorted entry sets before and after are identical, so nothing was added, dropped or duplicated. All 21 targets keep their Special:MyLanguage/ prefix, without which Module:Sequence drops them from the chain silently and Licenses is eaten by the core licenses message. Every label message and target page exists; no entry is another entry plus a slash, so positionOf's prefix match is still unambiguous. The file carries no translate units and there is no per-language sidebar, so nothing goes stale.

Not done here

Three content defects the review turned up, all of them equally true on main and none fixed by reordering:

• Troubleshooting's "Two configuration files, one of them ignored" says the first in precedence order wins, without naming the order or linking Configuration — and tells the reader to delete the others.
• Writing an extension puts WikvenRepositories at the top level, a sibling of config:; Configuration nests it under config:, and a top-level key is exactly what Troubleshooting says warns and is ignored. The same page writes .wikven.yml where every other page writes .wikven.yaml.
• Editing sidebar has no inbound prose link from any page — the sidebar is its only route in, which its move to eleventh makes slightly more so.