discuss: status report author checkup
Subject:
Re: status report author checkup
From:
Stein Gjoen ####@####.####
Date:
12 Aug 2005 10:39:45 -0000
Message-Id: <42FC7C4F.7010203@mail.nyx.net>
Machtelt Garrels wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Aug 2005, David Lawyer wrote:
>
>>But wikis to discuss a doc? Good idea perhaps (but see above), except
A similar idea is what is behing the ticket system I showed earlier
where any reader can make a comment in a sidebar to the article that
the author maintains alone.
>>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.
Even worse, Google frequently finds Wikipedia mirrors such as
Answers.com that uses banner advertising, rather than the
advertisement free Wikipedia.
> Apart from my personal aversion, I am worried about a couple of things:
>
> - - How does wiki-usage relate to our mirror sites?
That is non-obvious and a decision has to be made. Either:
- a single centralised wiki for TLDP with static pages
extracted to mirrors. The problem is when to do this
- daily, with all the possible vandalisms?
- weekly, just after a freeze for inspection?
- monthly or so, using a baselined version?
- all mirrors use wiki and synchronise themselves. Difficult.
> - - Apart from all the useless comments by readers of good faith, how about
> those small-minded people who use impolite and rude language?
Looking at Wikipedia I see the trend of vandalism is on
the increase. Just the last 6 months has seen more vandalism
than the previous years for some pages.
We should also expect robot vandalism inserting spam, just
like the blogging world has seen. Personally I would not like
fast and unchecked mirroring of vandalised HOWTOs advertising
things I get hundres of offers for every day.
> - - Wiki-to-docbook/linuxdoc: does that mean that wiki comments can directly
> be used to change a document, presumbly by the author? I don't see how
> this would work...
The markup at Wikipedia is very simple. Converting back and
forth with LinuxDoc could probably be done in a small shellscript.
>>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.
>>
>
> Agreed. I don't know anything about databases or it would already have
> been there. We need
>
> - - somebody who is committed
> - - agreement of iBiblio
> - - overview of data that should be managed in a DB
Another possibility is to see if we can be sponsored by an
established document management company with their product.
The issues we face are not by any means new, and these have
been adressed by several systems. I just have not seen any
that are free.
Regards,
Stein Gjoen
