Hi Tim,
I am certainly sympathetic to your goals and philosophical
position. Rev users generally seem sympathetic to the manufacturer
-- wish it well, want it to succeed. Me too.
It's their product I want to live long and prosper, really ;). If the
cheap option, dreamcard, could be acquired by a company or a
government which would make it available open source, this would be
fantastic!
My initial reaction -- what's there is admirable. The documentation
you have written is somewhat clearer and less terse than Rev's
native documentation, with more examples.
Thanks. But I don't deserve the credits. Much of it is just cut and
paste from this list... with possibly a few rewrites. There is
***extraordinary** material posted on this list (if you have time to
read all posts, past and present, which is not really to be expected
from a recent user). We could gain so much if we were reusing it more
than we presently do.
Of course the number of items and issues documented is relatively
small. I didn't spend a lot of time exploring -- I might have
overlooked something. I'm sorry you're disappointed with the
overall reaction so far.
Beyond that, I wonder if initial visitors will be daunted by the
task of re-writing Rev's native documentation and moving it to your
wiki, while simultaneously improving and supplementing the native
documentation. If Rev's native documentation can't be moved
wholesale to a wiki, with its hyperlinks, "see also" links, and so
on, intact, for the sake of wiki-type improving and supplementing,
I fear too many potential wiki users will be too daunted, and it
just won't catch on.
I hope I'm wrong, though.
You are probably right... if the ultimate goal is a good
documentation, efforts should be centralized rather than dispersed. I
am interested in giving a hand to produce a good documentation more
than in hosting a few pages on snippets. But for the moment, there is
room for individual efforts... I didn't really feel a real
"community" momentum for "improving and supplementing the native
documentation". This surprises me. My understanding is that all the
current doc has in fact been produced collaboratively, in a wiki. At
least, I came across a wiki that contained this documentation,
written in 2001-2002. I cannot find its url anymore.
But centralized organisation doesn't mean unique resource. Members of
this list have very different skill level and learning style. Some
like textual explanations. Others prefer to be presented with
examples of code alone.
I am ready to translate all xml documents into a wiki format if this
can help (wouldn't take more than a day, I have already written
various html2wiki conversion routines).
I visited your site, and bookmarked it.
Good, you will join the 44 visitors a day (yes, about 1300 a month,
not hits, not robots, individual visitors... not too bad).
And I got two new users and a new contribution to the snippets.
Thanks a lot Mark for your contribution!
I am very curious... What would be needed to get more of you register
and contribute? Tell me and I do it :). Seriously! I know that taking
part in an open wiki requires a culture shift. Our generation hasn't
really learned to work collaboratively.... What do you believe would
help get persons participate in a communal initiative? What are the
factors that encourage or discourage participation? What is your own
perception of this... Do you feel like exposing yourself when
participating to a wiki (what if I make a spellling errror, somebody
will see it?)... this shouldn't be too different from the mailing
list... in fact, even better if you leave an error, then somebody can
come and correct it. Or is it this the problem, that somebody can
come and change what you have written.
Maybe I should start to write errors (there probably are some)...
maybe persons will then think, this is wrong, I really need to
intervene... done, ah!, without me, this wiki wouldn't be worth
visiting.
What is the strongest in most humans, the need to feel that they
bring a valuable contribution or the need for their own, personal
contribution, to be valued? What environment needs to be created for
the former rather than the later to become more important?
Marielle
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------
Marielle Lange (PhD), Psycholinguist
Alternative emails: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Homepage
http://homepages.lexicall.org/mlange/
Easy access to lexical databases http://lexicall.org
Supporting Education Technologists http://
revolution.lexicall.org
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