<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 9/20/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Jon Radel</b> <<a href="mailto:jon@radel.com">jon@radel.com</a>> wrote:</span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Speaking just for myself, mind you, I find documentation written by<br>those without knowledge, or without clue, or complete lack of writing<br>skills, tends to be unenlightening. If someone who is trying to figure<br>out what it all means, gathering knowledge and clue best he can, decides
<br>he has nothing to add yet other than questions (and he suspects that<br>they're not even very clever questions quite yet), might he not feel<br>just a little shy about "defacing" the documentation? Allow people to
<br>self-select out of editing the documentation while still participating.</blockquote><div><br><br>That may be, but if you see a page like that, and figure it out do you go back and update the wiki? For anything that was missing and you eventually figured it out do you go back and update the wiki now that you know?
<br><br>Someone may feel shy about that, but to discourage all people from contributing just because they arent professional writers would seem to generate a lot less documentation than what is already done. Many of hte pages werent written all in one shot, they were started by someone, added to by someone else, refined by a 3rd person and so on. Thus is the nature of a wiki.
<br><br>Personally I would rather see people who dont have good writing skills at least try than people complain there isnt documentation, and demand help, and then refuse to document anything (that has happened before). For someone to say that something is unclear, odds are its unclear for others as well, and documenting they are unsure of something cant hurt as I see it. Perhaps someone who is reading that page to refresh their memory will see that comment and decide to clarify something.
<br><br>But then this is a community effort, you will always have some in the community that feel it should be done more of a closed documentation site to prevent crazy people from entering wrong information, you will have others that think there shouldnt even be passwords and accounts, and the majority will be somewhere in between. It will be impossible for everyone to agree all the time, especially when the project gets new members to the community. Choice and selection in how people interact with the documentation should be provided, one reason why I did hte pdf to give more choice in how you deal with it (the other is that the search tool works better :)
<br><br>The problem with that however is unless there is someone to read and act upon those requests then the requests are useless. If others are volunteering to actively monitor such requests and act upon those, more power to you. I know that personally I will not because I dont spend that much time on the wiki itself anymore. As a result I am suggesting methods that I would notice, as would anyone else acting like myself - just goto the page to refresh memory and leave.
<br><br>Anyone is free to create a page that would request people to add stuff there, and likely it would have taken less time than this thread has already consumed. I still believe the 'justification' comments about this suggest that it wont be used that often however, specifically:
<br>they dont think their question is clever they wont ask - why would they ask on a seperate page then?<br>they dont know how to use the system - how can they use it then?<br>they dont know enough to know what htey are looking for - they may just use that page as a trouble ticket system
<br>and so on. <br><br>But anyone who wants to do it is more than welcome to, just click the edit link at the top of the page, create a link to the new page, save and click on that link to create the new page.<br><br><br>
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