[pmwiki-users] PmWiki forum...

Sandy sandy at onebit.ca
Tue Mar 20 16:37:49 CDT 2007


After reading the forum / mailing list to March 20:

Pm's idea looks good. It will only be as good as it is maintained, but 
that's not news. And the nicer it is, the more likely it will be 
maintained. (I see he's already put it into action.)

I agree that wiki is better for solutions, and mailinglist or forum is 
best for the discussion.

Other ideas that came up as I read, summarized in one post.

1. Add a check-box list of *all* the cookbook categories to the cookbook 
edit page.

A list of categories works better than remembering them because:

It prevents proliferation / mis-spelling / synonyms.

It encourages you to consider several options, and a check-box list lets 
you choose several.

I say edit rather than starting template because sometimes as the 
discussion continues we realize it should be in several categories.

Then again, now we have a nice list down the side to remind us.

2. Possible troublesome scenario: Repeat questions.

When someone asks a question, she'll bookmark her brand-new page, come 
back in a few days, maybe a week or two, and expect to see the page she 
started, complete with answer (which may be "see here") So the page has 
to hang around for at least a month or two.

But after that, it should go. Maybe a category "repeat asked in 
March2007". However, before deleting it, we have to consider why the 
asker couldn't find it in the first place. Add the keywords (and 
phrases) she used to the "main" answer, or even the entire question.

3. Idea for thought: "Status" as in alpha / beta / testing / broken. 
Sometimes clear from the comments, sometimes not.

4. List of recipes someone maintains. I often look at the maintainer 
when deciding which of two recipes to try. Is there a way for 
maintainers to know which recipes they are listed on (as opposed to 
those they've signed a comment on?)

Cheers!

Sandy





Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>>> 5) The idea a wiki is better than a forum is also nonsense.  [...]
>> Strong words there!  I dare you to justify this bald assertion.
>> You say that we haven't proven that the mailing list is good, well, you
>> haven't proven in any way that a forum is good.
> 
> Indeed, Dan has made some strong assertions here (many of which
> I also find unsupported).  However, I must also say that I
> briefly visited the sample forum Dan put together at
> http://www.fast.st/pmwiki/index.php, and based on Dan's work
> there I think I finally see an answer to the whole problem...which I'll
> describe below.
> 
> First I need to acknowledge a quick "Thank you!" to Dan
> for the time he put into the beta PmWiki forum.  Although I
> don't think I'll use the ZAPforum approach that he's prototyped,
> seeing it in action did finally cause me to see a path through 
> this mess.  So Dan gets a lot of credit for pushing hard
> enough to get us to a solution on this.  
> 
>> In all cases, the difficulty is in taxonomy and grouping pages/threads
>> in a way that makes the right page/thread easy to find.
> 
> Kathryn has it exactly right here.
> 
> When I first visited Dan's PmWiki forum site, the first thing I 
> noticed was that the front page didn't have any immediate clues 
> about how to navigate to find questions or answers to questions.  
> Then I noticed the "topics" list in the in the sidebar, with 
> things like Administration, Beginners, Bugs, Developers, etc.
> My thought was... "Oh, okay.  That could work."
> 
> Clicking one of the topics goes to a "topic" page that then displays
> the questions that have been asked with that topic.  "Okay, that 
> works nicely for navigation, too."
> 
> So, as Kathryn says, the key to solving this problem (and
> the difficult part) is to have a reasonable set of topics 
> with which to organize the questions, answers and commentary.
> 
> Dan's topic list is a reasonable start.  But there's more...
> 
> My next (fallacious) thought in playing with Dan's site was something 
> along the lines of "Too bad we can't easily put a topic list like 
> this in the sidebar on pmwiki.org... the sidebar on pmwiki.org really 
> needs to keep a structure like it has now."  I then played with the 
> forum some more, found a few more things I liked and disliked about 
> it, and figured I'd just file the experience away for a while until 
> an answer presented itself.
> 
> But a few minutes later the answers came like lightning:
> 
> 1.  Oops!  We **can** have a sidebar on pmwiki.org with topics
>     like those on Dan's forum site!  Just because the main sidebar
>     on pmwiki.org needs a certain structure doesn't mean the
>     Cookbook needs to have that same structure also.  The Cookbook 
>     group can (and should) have its own specialized sidebar, with 
>     topics organizing the recipes.  The recipes then handle the
>     load of presenting questions and answers.
> 
> 2.  ...and the Cookbook needs organization anyway, and a topic list
>     in the sidebar is a really good organizating framework for doing that.
>     Each topic goes to a "topic page" that displays the recipes
>     associated with that topic.
> 
> 3.  This solves the problem of the unwieldy Cookbook home page,
>     because it simply becomes an index to the available topics
>     (which are also available via the sidebar links).
> 
> 4.  The main problem then becomes keeping the topic pages up to
>     date.  But we already have an excellent mechanism for this...
>     Categories!  Each recipe simply identifies the category or
>     categories (topics) it's associated with, and a topic page
>     is simply a pagelist of all the recipes with that given
>     category.
> 
> 5.  And this resolves the speed problem I was encountering with
>     my Cookbook.Cookbook-ByCategory experiment -- instead of
>     trying to get a listing of all recipes into a single categorized
>     page (slow), we let the individual topic pages handle it.  We 
>     can also have an "All Recipes topic" that simply displays a list 
>     of all of the cookbook recipes and their descriptions.
> 
> 6.  Since many of the recipe pages already have a "Questions answered
>     by this recipe" section, a little bit of structure added to
>     those sections would make it possible to use a pagelist to
>     show the questions answered by the recipes within each topic.
>     This makes it look more like a FAQ type of document.
> 
> 7.  We then return to my earlier idea to have a form that makes it
>     easy for people to post questions as new pages in the cookbook.
>     The form would appear on the various topic pages, and would
>     automatically create a new page containing the question, as well
>     as the associated topic tag and an [[!AnswerMe]] tag that 
>     indicates the question needs an answer.  The [[!AnswerMe]]
>     tag makes it easy to locate any questions that haven't
>     ben resolved (for those of us who like to do such things).
> 
> 8.  When we think that a question has finally been adequately
>     resolved, we remove the [[!AnswerMe]] tag and adjust any
>     other tags in the page as appropriate.  The question page
>     has ultimately become a "question+answer" recipe...
> 
> This solves a *lot* of problems at once... 
> 
> - It solves the speed problem of the Cookbook.Cookbook-ByCategory 
>   page, because each topic area can be handled with just one or 
>   two pagelist directives... unlike Cookbook-ByCategory which
>   has a lot of separate pagelist directives and takes too long
>   to render.
> 
> - The Cookbook becomes the single repository for any information
>   and tips that don't quite fit into the core documentation.  It
>   returns cookbook to it's original purpose of being the place
>   to provide a variety of answers about PmWiki configuration,
>   and not just a place for recipes.
> 
> - It gives us a way to quickly organize and reorganize questions
>   and topics as needed into more appropriate structures.
> 
> - Unanswered questions are easy to locate, and they quickly become
>   "answer recipes" that document how to solve a given problem
>   for whoever comes by later with a similar question.
> 
> - Background discussion and commentary for each answer recipe
>   can be easily stored in an associated '-Talk' page for the
>   recipe.
> 
> I like it.  I like it a lot.  Based on this I will probably start 
> re-organizing the Cookbook and the PmWiki.Questions page along 
> these lines over the next couple of days.  Once I get the basic
> structures in place, others can of course help with refactoring
> and migrating information and recipes to where they belong.
> 
> Thanks to all who participated in this discussion, it has
> been extremely valuable and helpful.
> 
> Pm




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