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

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Aug 02, 2005 at 11:35:07PM -0400, Neil Herber wrote:
> 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.

<soapbox>
For some time I've been on a campaign to reduce the use of the
word "users".  In reviewing papers, proposals, and design documents
I find that authors too often lazily toss around the generic and often
ambiguous word "user" -- often it ends up being an unbound pronoun.  
Better are words that indicate the role of the person being referred to, 
such as author, reader, writer, client, customer, supplier, programmer, 
developer, teacher, student, vendor, regulator, ...

As an extreme example, I once reviewed a master's thesis that contained
"user" four times in a single sentence, with each use of the word
referring to a different individual.  

That said, I know it's a losing battle, and I also know that the
name I gave to this mailing list makes me a bit hypocritical on this
point.  :-)

In general I'd prefer to stick with "authors", "admins", and "readers",
and perhaps use "all" or "person" when we're referring to someone
who could be in any of these roles.  This isn't to say that we
can never use the word "user" in the docs, but I'd hate to formalize
its usage.

</soapbox>

> 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.

This is probably good.

> 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

In this case I'm certain there's an audience that corresponds to the
group you're referring to here, but I'm equally certain that "users"
isn't really the best word to describe that audience.  :-)  In
this case the audience is more like "people interested in learning 
more about PmWiki", which means we could probably identify these 
specific documents by their topic ("About PmWiki") as opposed 
to the intended audience.

Pm