[Pmwiki-users] suggestions for the new documentation structure

[Patrick R. Michaud]

Starting with the last item first:

On Mon, Oct 18, 2004 at 11:58:10AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> p.s.  my definition of author is one who either creates new pages or
> edits existing ones.  am i getting that wrong?

No, that's right.  But in many sites authors may not even know (or care)
that they're working in a "wiki", all they need to know, or all the
site administrator wants them to know, is that they can edit and create
pages.

> > *sigh*, there's "user" again--you mean "so that an administrator could
> > keep going...".  Where do authors start?
> actually, no, i really meant so that an author could keep going.  one
> of the early sections i proposed was "how to create a new page", which
> seems to be exactly where authors start.

In the outline you sent, "Starting a new page" comes after
"Overview" (wiki, PmWiki philosophy, audience, support), 
"Basic Installation", and "The PmWiki files", all of which are
really administrator topics.  If I were a (non-administrative) author 
on a departmental site looking at this outline, I'd fairly quickly assume 
from this that either (1) the stuff on this page is intended for whoever is 
installing the application, which isn't me, or (2) that writing pages 
on a wiki site involves knowing a lot of details about how its 
installed, which is more work than I want to do.

To me it's an open question about whether "creating new pages" or "editing
existing pages" should come first when describing the system to authors.

Pm