discuss: Document Lifetimes?
Subject:
Re: Document Lifetimes?
From:
Tabatha Marshall ####@####.####
Date:
11 Nov 2003 22:15:09 -0000
Message-Id: <1068588881.16950.31.camel@mysticchild>
On Tue, 2003-11-11 at 14:06, Tabatha Marshall wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-11-11 at 13:42, David Lawyer wrote:
> > > As a matter of fact, that prototype I mentioned is going to incorporate
> > > ratings, and have status fields for the documents in the collection.
> > > One idea we have is that if a document hasn't been updated in X amount
> > > of time, the status gets set to require a review.
> >
> > The value of X should be different for each Doc. If the technology and
> > software covered by the doc is rapidly changing, it should be short.
> > For documents covering certain models of hardware, they should still be
> > valid many years later. So then X would be several years long.
>
> I do agree with you, but to build a system around that might be a
> challenge... :D
>
> Even if the reviewer came to the author after, say, a year, if nothing
> had to be changed, the document could then be marked as reviewed, or
> whatever appropriate status, and things would continue on as usual.
> This way, every document would be touched at least once a year, even if
> no changes were made. It's enough to satisfy that human eyes saw it and
> agreed it was still a valid doc. Such a process could be automated too,
> which would be a handy thing.
I discussed the idea of an automatic review schedule with the developer
today and one way we can accomplish your idea is to set a schedule,
whereby for categories, or by document, a schedule can be set.
For example, if hardware-related documentation rarely goes obsolete, we
can set a term for that category to be, say, 2 years before it's flagged
for review. If it's something that changes frequently (and again, this
can be by category or by document), we can set the term to whatever we
want. Perhaps this is a field that goes into the database. You
remember the old db.linuxdoc.org? We had a page associated with the
doc. It would be exactly like that, and we'd be able to set the term of
the review by choosing it from a drop-down.
So that's one way to achieve varying review terms. Like?
Tab
--
Tabatha Marshall
Web: www.merlinmonroe.com
Linux Documentation Project Review Coordinator (http://www.tldp.org)
Linux Counter Area Manager US:wa (http://counter.li.org)
