On 5/16/07, John Beckett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Martin Krischik wrote:
> We should not include comments on the content page!
> That's what the discussion page is for.
You are very keen on that point, so I'm going into a bit of
detail about why I don't agree.
A wiki discussion page (as you know!) is intended for people to
discuss the future of the page. Does an error need fixing? Are
there points which need to be expanded? Is the content or style
inconsistent with overall guidelines?
Or, on the discussion page, I might ask why you reverted my
edits, and we could debate whether my wording was better than
yours.
We'll still need the above in a Vim wiki.
However, the Comments in Vim Tips are a different animal. Most
comments are fluff, and need to be deleted ASAP.
Many comments are very helpful, and their content needs to be
merged into the body of the tip. On some tips, a reader would
need a lot of persistence to work out what to do, because the
tip says X, some comment says Y, and another comment says Z.
I think I recall seeing cases where a comment points out that
the tip is hopeless because there's a better way of handling the
situation. We wouldn't want that comment hidden on the
discussion page (where a casual reader won't see it).
As I understand it, the whole point of moving Vim Tips to a wiki
is so that we can fix each tip so that there is one consistent
story on each page.
You are correct that having the comments on the main page will
be ugly. However, we hope that will be temporary. Perhaps I
should say that *I* hope it will be temporary because I see that
the proposed sample has a section for Comments.
I imagine editing the wiki will go like this:
- Import all tips with comments on main page.
- Edit important tips and clean them up completely.
- Edit nearly all tips to remove junk comments.
- Leave difficult cases for later.
I imagine there will be lots of difficult cases where
considerable effort would be needed to merge the comments.
In those cases, we would just leave the useful comments, perhaps
editing them where helpful.
Later (say in six months) we would discuss what to do with those
tips that still have unmerged comments. In some cases, it might
be very reasonable to leave comments on the main page. For
example, a tip might describe a scenario and its solution.
Then a comment might say that if you are running on a certain
platform, then a better approach would be something else.
It may never be worth fixing all tips to eliminate such
comments, yet you wouldn't want to hide that useful info on
the discussion page.
I think that following the above strategy would be much easier
for people editing a tip (easier than editing the main page and
the discussion page, because once a comment is dealt with, it
would have to be removed from the discussion page).
Also, seeing the old comments on the main page would be an
immediate reminder that the tip needs cleaning up.
Imagine the mess if comments were on the discussion page, then
someone edited the main page to include a few useful comments
from the discussion page, but failed to remove those comments.
It would then take herculean efforts to properly fix the tip,
and the discussion pages would have so much junk in them that
their function as a tip discussion would fail.
John
Also, just to follow up with what John said, Wikipedia is /not/ like
most wiki's in this respect. I read a certain wiki off and on and I
have stumbled upon a few that are similar where people just ask
questions right on the page. It's pretty nice once you get used to
it, so I'd say leave the discussion for meta-thought and not actual
thoughts about content.
-fREW
