On Fri, 12 Nov 2010, Parker wrote:
i want to share my first reaction, which is not logical or careful or
patient but is nonetheless real:
<3 for being direct and honest with me!
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]).
If you want to document new things, you can do it in whatever way you
choose. The smartest way for now, for you, is probably to update the old
Website_documentation page if you don't want to bother with the new thing.
I'm entirely serious. Writing more stuff in that page is a good idea, at
least until we officially retire it!
Having said that, I do suggest reading
http://wiki.freeculture.org/Explainers_and_recipes and
http://wiki.freeculture.org/Create_a_web_team_explainer .
I want you to work with me on this for a week or so, and then see how you
feel. Basically, I think we need to write lots of general "explainers" so
that other people understand how the heck things work. I'm willing to undo
this all; it's an experiment. (-:
The intimidation factor I *think* will go down if the wiki feels
organized. I want to measure people's feelings after a while, and I'm
willing to revert these changes if they're a bad idea.
As for making things harder -- that makes sense, although
http://wiki.freeculture.org/Category:Web_team_recipe will list them. So
now you can browse... and maybe search.
It would be interesting to have a view of the wiki that was all the
"Category:Web team recipe" pages smushed into each other. Maybe soonish,
Parker, I can create that, and it'll resolve your worries about
findability...?
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.
I totally sympathize with the feeling of being uprooted. In the long run,
you and I are old fogies whose ways need to change. I think that if we are
going to eventually arrive at something that explains things to other
people, we're going to need some upheaval.
Yours in wiki-arity,
-- Asheesh.
--
Good day for a change of scene. Repaper the bedroom wall.
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