Subject:
Re: status report author checkup
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
12 Aug 2005 07:51:23 -0000
Message-Id: <20050812074839.GE1677@lafn.org>
On Wed, Aug 10, 2005 at 02:24:40PM +0200, jdd wrote:
> I was out of this list for quite a time, now, so forgive me
> if I come back on an already (recently) devised problem.
>
> But I'm heavily involved with wiki, now (mediawiki (the wiki
> of wikipedia), for example http://www.opensuse.org).
>
> I think there is no more reason to continue disregarding the
> wiki way.
>
> I think there should be a mediawiki on the tldp site. It
> would be very nice if any HOWTO was present in wiki form,
> but even without this, a _main place_ where any volunteer
> author could share advices with users would be very nice.
I don't understand. Would there be a wiki for each howto for
discussion of that howto and of Linux problems within the scope of the
howto? I've got a problem with this, since some of the email I get is
asking for help by people that haven't even read the doc., some is
poorly written, some don't provide enough info on their problem, some
are asking for help with a MS Windows OS, etc. In other words there
is a lot of noise and readers shouldn't be exposed to this noise.
Except for a howto that not being maintained. Then people could look
at the comments and see that the author is not responding, then that's
useful. It would be nice to have someone from LDP read over all the
comments on all the howtos, but that's a full-time job.
A big problem with reader comments is that most readers don't know the
topic (if they knew the topic, they wouldn't be reading about it). So
comments from them may not reveal errors, etc.
At present, if the author uses a mailto url in the doc, then just a
click will start an email to the author.
> This is nearly no admin work, untar, setup (5 minutes),
> write a main page (an afternoon) and go...
>
> In fact I would really appreciate a mediawiki->docbook
> backend, because I use docbook _only_ for my howto and it's
> a reason it's not often up to date, it's each time a two
> days process to learn back docbook.
This is why I think it best to use LinuxDoc. When I modify something
in LinuxDoc, often I don't even need to add a single tag, since
paragraphs need no tags. I've looked at wiki markup and think that
LinuxDoc markup is no more complex. But I guess there are more people
around that know wiki markup so I think that a wiki->linuxdoc converter
would be nice too.
>
> Mediawiki is now a fairly mature project, reasonably easy
> but powerfull, and quite largely spread, so many people
> begin to know it's syntax
>
> and it's not OT here, it could be far more easy to track
> authors and outdated HOWTO's with this wiki in place!!!
I'm not sure that the wikis would be used all that much and it puts a
burden on every author to check out his wiki frequently for comments
or modifications. We already have a howto-generator to make it easy
to create a howto (or to learn Linuxdoc, since once the draft is
written one wouldn't use the howto-generator anymore).
But wikis to discuss a doc? Good idea perhaps (but see above), except
I wonder how many readers would find it. What % of readers download
howtos (such as the Debian packages) and read them off-line? Then
online readers many use Google, etc. to find just a section of a
howto, and never know there is a wiki for comments, since they never
read the part of the howto that links to the wiki.
I assume that all howtos would contain a link to their wiki comments.
Perhaps the wiki comments could be added to the howto verbatim in
cases where the author isn't actively maintaining the howto. But
automating this is a problem.
Furthermore, someone said a year ago or so that they were taking all
LDP docs and putting them on the web in wiki. Did this ever happen
and if so, what are the results?
The vapor-ware database for LDP was going to tie in with wikis and
that would make the wikis more valuable. This database could be used
to email the author the changes made to the wiki. A good database
and content management system is needed by LDP much more than a wiki,
but it's a lot more work to implement.
David Lawyer
