[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/



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