[pmwiki-users] PmWiki forum...

[Neil Herber (nospam)]

The Editor wrote:
> Other than Pm's fair attempt at an answer, and his welcome suggestions
> for improving the cookbook, most of the responses to my post were
> pretty inane.  No offensce, but really...

I would not have taken any offense and probably not have responded to 
this (since others have made my points for me) except that you named me 
in your response.

I have trimmed the original post to save space.

> We
> have what, maybe 40-50 active developers sitting around and answering
> each other's emails.

This is clearly not true. If all the questions are being asked by active 
developers, why do we get repeated requests for the most basic items? 
The developers seem to generate the most mail, but the newby questions 
don't come from them.

> 2) The PmWiki FAQ/Question page is atrocious. I think we'd be better
> off deleting it than have it on the PmWiki page.  I'm sorry, but that
> is about the worst example of poorly organized information I've ever
> seen.

I made more or less the same comment in August 2005. Hagan Fox, Patrick, 
myself and many others then spent considerable time refactoring the 
page, coming up with new markups and so on. It appears that things have 
gone back to the former state.

> 3) The lousy quality of the FAQ page is no proof the mailing list
> works.  It's just proof we have a lousy FAQ system.

The mailing list does work regardless of the state of the FAQ. We don't 
have a lousy FAQ "system" - we just have a FAQ that has not been 
maintained. It takes time and effort that just doesn't appear to be 
forthcoming.

> 5) The idea a wiki is better than a forum is also nonsense.

I said: "I find that forums are great for "conversations" but lousy for 
conclusions. The best tool I have found for collaborative technical 
documentation is a wiki."

   If you
> read my post, I suggested we do one in PmWiki.

Doing a forum in PmWiki does not make turn the forum into a wiki.

> 6) For those who don't want to check the forum, it could easily be set
> so all posts are forwarded to the Mailing List for the rest of us
> email junkies.

The Gmane archive is simply the inverse of this idea.

> Ok, if you don't like the word Forum, think of it as a classification
> system for FAQ's.

Good idea. Don't call it what it is not. Very good idea.

> As Neil did with his silly little AQ post (more clutter to the PmWiki
> site), I decided to put my suggestion into practice also.  

Thanks for following my example. Despite the content, my page and my 
intent are absolutely serious. The current FAQ does not get maintained 
because no one has the time to do it. I was suggesting the AQ page for 
several reasons:
a) to encourage people to post the answers they got via email
b) so that people doing a PmWiki search *might* have a chance of finding 
the answer
c) as a staging ground to the FAQ

-- 
Neil Herber
Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/