[pmwiki-users] Fwd: PmWiki forum...
Neil Herber (nospam)
nospam at eton.ca
Tue Mar 20 10:02:33 CDT 2007
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/
More information about the pmwiki-users
mailing list