[haiku-web] Re: Community Documentation Collaboration (Was: Add Comunity Project)
- From: Urias McCullough <umccullough@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-web@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:10:45 -0700
Hmm... this might get a little bit political, and maybe a bit messy...
On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 9:26 PM, Jorge G. Mare <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> In my experience/opinion, using a wiki will make no difference in
> improving the quality of the documentation; in fact, I think it could
> actually be detrimental for the quality of the content; that was why the
> Haiku wiki was taken down in the first place: it had become a nobody's
> land full of inaccurate and redundant information, and a place that
> many used to express their opinions rather than to convey factual
> information. A free for all system (wiki or not), lends itself to this
> sort of results, which is why I personally do not like it.
Funny, I don't seem to recall very many people raising those concerns
publicly at the time... in fact, at that time, I seem to recall very
stale website content - and several people were collecting information
provided in the forums, and found elsewhere and gathering it on the
wiki so that there was a central location of collaborative and updated
content.
In fact there were a couple very active contributors to that wiki who
were trying to provide information that otherwise wasn't being
provided by anyone else at the time ;)
I honestly don't recall very many developers contributing to the wiki
at that time (or even the website for that matter), it seems like only
community members were using it.
Frankly, I have always believed it was taken down because it simply
was disliked. If the content on the wiki was in question, it certainly
could have been changed very easily by anyone who felt it was wrong.
Deleting the entire system simply because it was perceived as having
some bad information in it seems pretty harsh IMO. Our current Drupal
site is littered with inaccurate content, in the form of tutorials,
forum posts, comments on blog posts, etc. If you're suggesting that it
has now been distilled down to only the best quality content, is
accurate, and has no duplication of info, I think you're mistaken.
However, the gist of your post really seems to say: "When you allow
everyone to edit the content, your content may turn to rubbish". I
think we can agree that this concern is mostly unrelated to the use of
any specific software (which you did state).
If that's the general opinion, then it doesn't matter what software
solution we choose, they'll all fail. But I don't believe it has to be
that way, ease of moderation/review can make all the difference.
Instead, what we have now is a couple dozen websites/blogs where
people are posting their own content in whatever format they like
because they have no other outlet for that information. That would
normally be fine, except many times the information I find is
inaccurate or misleading - often because they either copied someone
else's inaccurate information, or some process has changed since the
content was written rendering it no longer accurate.
Anyhow, I suppose I'm really just dreaming at this point - even if we
set something up, as you said, people still must contribute to it. It
doesn't matter what software solution we choose. But I strongly
suggest we keep it "separate" from the main website - inter-mingling
of community-generated content and news articles or developer blog
posts for example could become very very messy.
The page that started this discussion, containing the community links
on it, on the other hand, would be a perfect candidate for something
that is community-maintained (and moderated).
Anyhow, let's definitely improve the website - get it updated to
Drupal 6 (or 7) and worry about this whole shebang once we've leveled
things out a bit more.
In the meantime, I recommend we start tagging the current website
content that needs to be updated or consolidated so that those who do
want to work on that project when the time is right will be able to
locate the content that is in question more easily.
One more point: Another problem with the way things are currently
done: there's a single author for any given document. Thus, if entire
documents are to be rewritten, there's a lack of "recognition" making
it less desirable from a contribution perspective. I realize this is a
pretty self-centered way to view things, but you must admit, it's
largely what drives open-source. I actually suspect this is a large
reason why people write duplicate content - so they can essentially
stamp their name on it and call it theirs.
- Urias
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