discuss: History of LDP
Subject:
Re: History of LDP
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
23 Jan 2016 23:06:57 +0000
Message-Id: <20160123230752.GU2571@daveslinux>
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 09:50:07AM -0500, Roger wrote:
> David Lawyer wrote
> >Publishing ones work on ones own website is not always a good idea, unless
> >there is someone available to take over the doc if the author is no longer
> >able to maintain it. And this happens a lot. People get busy with other
> >activities and sometimes even die.
>
> Recently, or within the past year or two, I've been dealing with apparently
> arrogant and young people who tend to be anti-social with their particular
> political agenda, while exploiting their distribution's domain names within
> their email addresses. (ie. Someone's Pythonic culture is better and faster
> than our lower-level or equivalent language.)
>
> Choice I have, either keep fighting and complaining while not being provided
> the required leverage by the younger owners of the companies and organizations,
> or just publish my writings to my own domain. Why continue aiding a crooked
> culture?
>
> So far, I see Wikipedia on-the-ball with these kinds of anti-social agendas or
> so-called attacks. Sort of a waste of time being a baby sitter, but this has
> to be done or else people start fighting over nothing. It's one of those
> things that sound tedious and time consuming, but certain people are trained to
> deal with and the situations are rather extremely easy to solve if people are
> trained to deal with such issues.
>
> >Another was the wiki problem. People would be more likely to edit docs if
> >one could just do it without registering. But it takes a lot of effort to
> >stop spam, including blocking ranges of leased urls that generate spam.
> >If ldp couldn't find the people to deal with this, perhaps ldp shouldn't
> >have a wiki. But ldp could have tried to evaluate non-ldp docs,
> >especially ones on Linux in Wikipedia. The problem with Wikipedia is that
> >it doesn't allow the original research which some HOWTO's contain.
>
> I tend to agree too, as documentation is sometimes submitted via liaisons, or
> somebody whom has intimate knowledge of a piece of hardware, but needs to
> remain anonymous; not due to criminal prosecution or 3rd party licensing
> conflicts, but for possible future contracts with such companies such as
> Microsoft.
>
> >Another question is: was not Poet (who advertised his business on his
> >linuxdoc.com site which also mirrored linuxdoc.org) when he said we should
> >accept docs in html? Who needs the other formats? If one needs text,
> >it's trivial to convert html to txt. Accepting docs in html also means
> >accepting docs in a format that generates html (linuxdoc, wikis, docbook,
> >etc).
>
> I've also written a few instructionals in the early days on other websites, and
> completely agree. If a person cannot simply use text, using Wiki or docbook is
> not going to improve their writing any more. (All instructionals tend to
> originate from a sketched text-only format.) Writing text is the initial and
> likely most essential step for writing an instructional. However (and sadly),
> Google is not engineered to categorize *.txt files into their search engine
> database, tending to require *.html type files.
But Google does incorporate them into its database and one can search on
words contained in the text document and find it. I know because I have a
few txt docs on my personal website and Google's "Webmaster Tools" show
that some people are finding them via Google. I should convert them to
html and see if I get more traffic for them (-:
>
> A large number of writings for the past centuries only had text! Not too
> further mention, some of the Wiki headings and indenting has become really
> horrid when viewing on a monitor or display.
> How about just doing text with some sort of version control system? ;-)
> Text being extremely easy and first hand knowledge, while something like
> Git provides security and monitoring of the files
I agree but one nice feature about linuxdoc (seldom used anymore) or wikis
is that they automatically create a table of contents. If there is no
such table in a doc, one can as a substitute type in words to search the
doc but a table of contents is sometimes easier to use to find what you
are looking for (or for something of interest you were not looking for):.
>
>
> --
> Roger
> http://rogerx.freeshell.org/
>
> ______________________
> http://lists.tldp.org/
>
>
David Lawyer
