On 2007-03-20 the Other michael is rumoured to have said: > Neil, I've added that to the WikiRefactoring page as a recommended action.
I added a usage suggestion. > > I've got a question posed under > http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/WikiRefactoring#Location > > I feel somewhat inhibited editing the PmWiki.org wiki -- there are two > main groups, PmWiki (which seems to be formal documentation that gets > distributed with... distributions) and Cookbook recipes. I don't think there is anything that should inhibit anyone from editing pages in the PmWiki group or from adding new pages. My understanding is that Patrick has a procedure for "pruning" the PmWiki group pages prior to issuing a release. But where do > other discussions go? WikiRefactoring isn't really a recipe, it's a > discussion of an ethic, proposals of a process. A Recipe seems to be > more finalized -- it's been baked, tasted, and pronounced edible. I think the main reasons people don't contribute to the docs are they don't know where their topic should go, and they are afraid of "messing up" the docs. I see the same reluctance on the wikis I run. > Does anybody else feel this way? Is that what there is so much more > email activity than wiki-editing? Why there are repeated calls for a > forum? One of the prime reasons there is so much email activity is that it works so well. I can waste hours searching the docs and not find what I am looking for, but a quick email to the list gets just the response I need. As a good PmWiki citizen, I should add the answers I am given on this list to the docs. As for forums (and here I am talking about things like Simple Machines Forum http://www.simplemachines.org/ , which I use on several sites), some people seem to think that they provide better organization of technical material. In my experience, they do not. They excell at providing a venue for conversations (and recording the conversations) but they do not provide any kind of collaborative, consensual documentation. There are some vendor forums I have tried to use that are totally awash in points and counter points. One single thread I was searching had over 50 pages of "yes but" comments and no conclusions that I could make use of. A single wiki page could have given me the answer (and might have been revised 50 times - but that would be invisible to me). I have also found some email archives extremely good for docs. For example, although it is not pretty, the SurgeMail mailing list archive (which appears to be an interface to a newsgroup) almost always gives me the answer I need in a few keystrokes. http://netwinsite.com/cgi/dnewsweb.cgi?cmd=xover&group=netwin.surgemail It is very similar to the Gmane interface for the PmWiki-users mailin list. http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.wiki.pmwiki.user -- Neil Herber Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/ _______________________________________________ pmwiki-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users
