Parker, I definitely don't spend as much time on the wiki as you, and I can't speak to a lot of your criticisms, but from my perspective, some of these changes look great. I feel like a common conversation we have (I know you and I have had this conversation at least twice) is me being like how do I do this, and you being like look at the wiki! But frankly, the wiki is confusing and hard for me to find things and I go around in circles, and it seems as of now, it's a little easier for me to navigate.
But it's entirely possible that all of that has nothing to do with your thoughts, so apologies in advance. Aditi On Nov 12, 2010, at 6:17 PM, Parker wrote: > i want to share my first reaction, which is not logical or careful or > patient but is nonetheless real: > > this abrupt change makes me feel lost. i feel like we had a document > that mostly documented things, and now we have a few empty categories. > and clearly the next task is to map the sections of this old document > into these new categories which probably make more semantic sense, but > it's not super immediately apparent to me how to do that (i know > there's a page explaining this), and i'm worried that in the future me > or other people will be intimidated by the fact that there's this > particular way of entering new info and so stuff won't get entered. > and i'm also just frustrated because i had been planning to add some > new stuff to the old doc, but now i suddenly have this other task of > of partitioning up existing stuff and that feels like busywork. and > sometimes modularity (in this case, multiple pages across 2 > categories, rather than one monstrous page) isn't good--for example, > it can make things harder to find (i think that's a legitimate worry > here--if a recipe isn't carefully titled, you have no hope of finding > it). i don't really understand categories and templates in mediawiki > and even if i learn them people other than me might still get confused > (see also how painful our SMW chapter database was [and how the last > board ended up maintaining their own spreadsheet because they couldn't > figure it out or just didnt have the patience for it]). > > fwiw, the old doc is: > http://wiki.freeculture.org/Website_documentation > > i should sleep on this and look at it again in the morning. > > maybe this email doesn't help, but i feel like if i didn't explain > these feelings bad things could happen, like i or other people could > feel bad about feeling lost and expect that feeling will go away > magically with time but then end up just silently stopping being > interested in maintaining good website documentation. > > On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 12:32 AM, Asheesh Laroia > <[email protected]> wrote: >> Hello lovely free culture-ists, >> >> I made some changes to the wiki. I called the "improvements", but we'll see >> what you guys think. >> >> 1. Pictures and clarity >> >> http://wiki.freeculture.org/Main_Page >> >> Look at that! Big, pretty pictures. >> >> But also, there are really only approximately two reasons to visit the wiki: >> web team documentation, and chapter leader stuff. The "Chapter leader stuff" >> sure is important! But the ugly front page, I think, scared people off. Now >> it's not so ugly, I hope. >> >> 2. Explainers and recipes >> >> The website documentation is a total mess. It's hard to read for people like >> me who need to *do* things, and hard for people like everyone-else to figure >> out how the website works, or what services the web team provides. >> >> Here's an "explainer" about explainers & recipes: >> http://wiki.freeculture.org/Explainers_and_recipes >> >> And here's a "recipe" on how to make an explainer: >> http://wiki.freeculture.org/Create_a_web_team_explainer >> >> 3. What needs explaining? >> >> I'm emailing discuss@ to ask you all! >> >> I'm not going to be able to write all the explainers. But the web team is >> bigger than me. >> >> 4. Good night! >> >> Why is it that I only ever email you guys past midnight? (-: >> >> -- Asheesh. >> >> -- >> You will never know hunger. >> _______________________________________________ >> Webteam mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/webteam _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss FAQ: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss
