On Friday, July 14, "Eli Zaretskii" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> From: David Vanderschel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> It has occurred to me that folks who contribute to the >> Wiki should be encouraged to reference material in the >> official manual and/or FAQ _whenever_ there is >> relevant documentation in either. >Yes. In addition, if some important information is missing, I'd >suggest to ask on emacs-devel why not add it to the manual or the >FAQ. That is, don't automatically add to the wiki something that you >think should be in the bundled docs. I think one of the appealing things about the Wiki is that one can make an improvement in the documentation happen NOW! Furthermore, even if the original person who suggests some new documentation does not get it quite right, others will come along and fix it. Going through the official channels will introduce delay that many folks are not willing to tolerate. That is why I conceived of some documentation upgrades as occurring in two phases - with transition to the official document only after there has been a little while for the state of the Wiki to settle. This compromise exploits the dynamic capabilities of the Wiki while maintaining the reviewed, authoritative position of the official documents. In this case, I would not think of the process as involving a "duplication" of effort. The process is more like an "iteration" approaching the final 'product'. >> To facilitate this, it would be helpful if the current >> FAQ could be accessed as HTML on the gnu.org site. >The last released FAQ _is_ accessible, but I see no reason not to >refer to the Info manual, since any Emacs user should already have >them as part of the distribution. My point is that there should be an HTML version on the gnu.org site in order to support links into it at the subsection level. The currently accessible FAQ is not so linkable (though the manual is). The Wiki cannot link to _my_ copies of the manual or the FAQ. It could only reference my copies by node name. That would not be very elegant for the Wiki. A copy of the FAQ or manual into which the Wiki can link need not be at gnu.org, as it could be a mirror of the official document. But I was thinking that linking to a copy at the gnu.org site would enhance the authoritative status of material referenced from the Wiki in this way. Probably not a significant issue. Regards, David V.
