[pmwiki-users] audiences revisited or revised ???

[Neil Herber]

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 is a slight modification of the system used by Pierre Rouzeau for the 
French docs.

One question that occurs to me: Do we really need a "user" audience? And I 
am sure that the answer is yes. Docs for users would include such topics as:
* what can PmWiki do?
* PmWiki philosophy
* WikiWikiWeb



Neil

Neil Herber
Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/
Eton Systems, 15 Pinepoint Drive, Nepean, ON, Canada K2H 6B1
Tel: (613) 829-4668