discuss: Re: WHATIS documents
Subject:
Re: WHATIS documents
From:
"John R. Daily" ####@####.####
Date:
7 Dec 2003 01:19:41 -0000
Message-Id: <200312070119.hB71JdDh010530@ms-smtp-02-eri0.ohiordc.rr.com>
Well, the silent death of this thread may be a harbinger of the
relevance and interest level. I'll recap some issues for
posterity.
* Description
Reusable, circumscriptive content of technical concepts. A
concept could warrant multiple documents for different levels
of sophistication.
* Audience
Rodolfo Paiz pointed out[1] that a WHATIS document should be of
use both to authors and general readers, and thus would be
packaged for distribution just as HOWTO documents are today.
* Licensing
Absolutely must be freely reusable and modifiable. No
alternatives to my original suggestions have been proposed:
+ Public domain
+ Attribution License[2]
* Technology
I suspect that the most effective way to manage the licensing
concern is to have a customized Wiki that would prevent
submission of content without agreement to the licensing terms.
The WikiText to DocBook tool[3], along with a tool to convert
DocBook or WikiText to Linuxdoc if one exists, would make life
easier for content authors wishing to reuse the WHATIS
documents.
* Permanent URIs
If WHATIS content is to be referenced from LDP documents
instead of included, a permanent location is desirable.
* Resources
David Laywer discussed[4] the personnel requirements. A
coordinator would be needed in addition to volunteers to author
and review the content.
The LDP CVS infrastructure may be useful as an alternative (or
supplement) to a Wiki.
As I see it, the major obstacle to quick progress on the concept
is the licensing issue.
I don't see any trivial solutions short of individual ownership
of each document, which would tend to lead to the same problems
that HOWTOs experience with missing or unresponsive maintainers,
albeit with a license that allows anyone to fork the content.
I'd much rather see collaborative efforts through a Wiki, but
that would seem to require some software development effort
(which I'm not averse to by any means, but I'd like to make sure
the benefit is clear and there's some consensus on the issue).
-John
[1] http://lists.tldp.org/index.cgi?1:mss:5742
[2] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/
[3] http://www.tldp.org/wt2db/
[4] http://lists.tldp.org/index.cgi?1:mss:5747
