discuss: Manifesto for 2010 (draft01) page
Subject:
Re: [discuss] Manifesto for 2010 (draft01) page
From:
David Greaves ####@####.####
Date:
5 Sep 2008 17:55:16 +0100
Message-Id: <48C16421.3090803@dgreaves.com>
jdd wrote:
> David Greaves a écrit :
>
>> It's fascinating that there is much discussion about docbooks, wikis,
>> process,
>> format etc.
>>
>> My primary complaint about LDP is that it presents outdated,
>> misleading and
>> often plain *wrong* information to its readers - and it does so in an
>> authoritative manner.
>>
>> Doctors have a creed "First, do no harm". Maybe LDP should have one:
>>
>> "First, spread no misinformation".
>
> outdated is certainly right for many, wrong is probably wrong...
>
> do you mean "wrong even at the moment the doc was written"?
No. That's an authoring/vetting process.
> if not your mail is simply troll... *all* of our documents (AFAIK) are
> *dated* so any reader should know.
Err.... thanks for the accusation.
So if you don't immediately agree 100% then I'm a troll?
What on earth is "trolling" about suggesting that an organisation dedicated to
documenting and sharing information should have "not mislead people" as a
primary objective ?
Anyway, lets not argue about that. My intent is to be constructive. My proposal
was positive and suggested a high level principle.
> and for the record, I've seen yesterday on an other list a very cleaver
> people give reference to a HOWTO dated 2005 and still right.
Which clearly shows that date is not a deciding factor in determining correctness.
Whereas "HOWTO Install the latest version of Ubuntu" is *highly likely* to be
wrong after 6 months or less.
No. I think you know what I'm complaining about.
It seems to me (from my experience) that LDP would rather continue to publish
misleading information than remove something from the 'current' list of
documents if it does not 'own' the more accurate and up-to-date information.
"Our way or the highway".
I think this attitude from some members could be countered if the LDP had a
stated goal of "spread no misinformation".
The current approach seems to be "provide the best information we can".
Seems worthy - but the problem is that it allows the LDP to sit back and ignore
the kind of problem I encountered.
The internet today has no place for an LDP that does not co-exist with the many
other sources of information. Sometimes the best thing the LDP can do is to
provide a HOWTO - other times it should acknowledge that a 3rd party wiki (or
even, tux forbid, a licensed, forced registration, paid-for, NDA-requiring MSDN
article) is the best information it knows about (although of course, it may
provide other links and archived or deprecated content).
To take the example above, if someone says "That Ubuntu Howto is outdated,
here's a link to a better article". Then the article should (IMHO) be checked,
possibly marked as "identified as outdated/deprecated" and the link should be
*considered* for inclusion in some user-friendly text that points to potentially
more up-to-date information and, of course, the original article.
> anyway, if you have some problems with some document, feel free to open
> a page with this document name on the wiki and write there what you
> want. It's not yet advertised, but it works
Like this:
http://wiki.tldp.org/Software_RAID_HOWTO
(Check the date)
David
