On 10/25/2012 1:39 PM, John Thornton wrote:

> John
>
> On 10/25/2012 8:49 AM, Kent A. Reed wrote:
>> On 10/25/2012 7:06 AM, John Thornton wrote:
>>> The wiki also has a ton of out of date pages that show up in google
>>> searches and afaik those can only be removed if you have access to the
>>> DH account.
>>>
>>> John
>> Are you referring to the old versions of pages that are kept
>> automagically by the wiki? If we remove those we lose the ability to see
>> what changes have been made over time.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Kent

> But we gain the ability to not confuse people who do a google search for
> anything LinuxCNC. If the page content is needed for history it should...
>


I don't know squat about the underlying wiki software, I just know it 
works by spawning new pages via links from existing pages and by 
creating new versions of existing pages. Is it possible going forward to 
stop Google from searching the "historical documents"? I know when I 
used my favorite link-checker last year I had trouble stopping it from 
digging past the current versions of wiki pages. I also know Google 
keeps past information around for a time so this wouldn't be a perfect 
solution but it would be a start.

> ...be stored some place like git that won't give a google hit for both the
> new and the old pages which is totally confusing to someone not in the

Using git is an intriguing idea. I have no idea how this could be 
implemented for a wiki---it seems to me it would have to become more web 
site than community-maintained wiki---but maybe somebody else does.

In my former life I've worked on collaborative projects where "do 
everything" content management systems were used to drive a web portal 
but frankly I was not impressed by the amount of administrative work 
involved.

> know. Imagine you know nothing and click on an old outdated page with
> instructions that totally won't work... having a fun day... NOT, I'd bet
> it is very frustrating to a newbee.

John, I try to put myself in the position of a newbie every time I read 
the wiki, the website, and the docs. That's what motivated me to spend 
time this winter/spring fixing up a number of wiki pages that were 
stale/misleading, notably the instructions on installing LinuxCNC. The 
reality is that I am not qualified to fix/add pages about many of the 
topics, since I don't run the requisite machinery, drivers, HAL 
components, etc.

Over the past two years, I've posted more than once about the state of 
the wiki and gotten back the sound of one hand clapping. We have met the 
enemy and he is us.

The wiki contains lots of "pages" we don't normally see. Some are 
previous versions of existing pages (click on "view other revisions" at 
bottom of a page). Some are pages that were orphaned when a referencing 
link was removed elsewhere (try entering various terms in the wiki 
"search" box sometime; you'll get some surprising hits). In addition, 
there are files that were uploaded to the wiki but either not used or 
later orphaned (I have previously asked this list about how to delete 
some of mine, to no avail).

As for the website, I can't edit it so I've posted messages about it. 
And the docs? I've certainly sent my share of comments to you about them 
(and I'm getting ready to add my two cents about the section on the comp 
preprocessor thanks to Andy's query).

If everybody did the same for all three LinuxCNC-information sources on 
the topics they know, we'd be well off.

Regards,
Kent

PS - sorry for trying to reorganize the content of this message. It 
isn't pretty in this case, but I prefer bottom- or in-posting.


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