[pmwiki-users] Re: audiences revisited or revised

[chr at home.se]

On Thu, 4 Aug 2005, V.Krishn wrote:

> > On Wednesday 03 August 2005 14:22, nospam at eton.ca wrote:
> > ...snip
> > I have been updating some of the docs and have had second thoughts about
> > how to refer to audiences in a consistent way that everybody agrees with.
> > Does the following make sense?
> >
> > 1) A generic term for anyone accessing the wiki is a "user".
> > 2) Users may also be "authors", that is, individuals who add to or edit the
> > content of the wiki.
> > 3) A generally limited number of users are "admins", individuals who can
> > control the operation of the wiki in various ways.
> >
> > On the http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/Audiences page, authors are
> > further divided into two groups: naive and experienced. There is some
> > cultural baggage that goes along with these names. They might be better
> > described as conservative (not willing to do much markup) and daring
> > (willing to use lots of markup) authors, but those terms are just as
> > loaded. The same sort of classification could apply to admins
> > (conservative/daring).
> >
> > Rather than ascribing abilities to the users,  why not ascribe a level to
> > the material being documented? This is already done to some degree with
> > page names like Simple Tables and Advanced Tables.
> >
> > The points being made on the Audiences page about "naive authors" are still
> > very valid. What I am suggesting is a retraction of my original proposal
> > for 4 audiences (2 author, 2 admin) and adoption (or retention!) of the
> > terms user, author and admin as category tags for the docs. Each topic in
> > the docs could (should?) indicate if it is a basic, intermediate or
> > advanced topic.
> This sounds good to me. On right-top of every page we can have:
>  
> User: User (can it be "Reader"?)
> Level: Basic
> OR
> User: Author
> Level: Advanced
> OR
> User: Author, Admin
> Level: Intermediate
> 
> Placement and Style has to be decided upon so that the look is consistent 
> throughout.

If we used markup for this we wouldn't have to worry so much about the 
consistency of the appearance. Adding something like
   
        (:audience advanced-user advanced-author:)

should then result in some suitable text. Or could this be done using wiki
styles? Just a thought, sorry for going slightly off topic here...
   
> Can we please decide upon some wikistyles so that we can start the
> documentation process. Suggestions:
> 
> %warning%
> %configcode%
> %csscode%
> %othecode%
> %apache% OR %server%
> %suggestions%

Sound's ok to me, although I'd prefer

	%config% - For snippets that typically go into local/config.php

I think that's going to be one of the most frequently used wiki styles in 
the documentation...

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr