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  • From: Mark Bainter <mbainter-smgl AT trampledstones.com>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] Tome nominations
  • Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2008 10:41:44 -0500

Jaka Kranjc [smgl AT lynxlynx.info] wrote:
> Users we've never heard from contribute to the wiki. Even kids! :) And you
> don't have to contribute to documentation regularly to make it count. If
> someone does a wiki commit and then disappears, that's perfectly fine and
> even great (the contribution part).

How often does this happen, and how valuable are these contributions? I
would think the majority of *our* userbase would be more than
technically capable of checking out a repo, making a change, and
submitting a patch. Especially if we had a basic doc procedure to
follow.

However, beyond the technical problem is the time committment problem.
If a user is looking at the site, and sees in the docs something that
isn't really correct anymore, how will they respond? If it's just a
wiki, and all they have to do is click to edit the doc, make the
correction, and save it - they'll probably take the time to do it.

Lets consider an average user under a latex scenario. They see the
problem, and determine to take some time to fix it. They search the
site and discover they need to use git to make the change. Ok, no
biggie, lets assume they already have git installed anyway. They clone
the repo. Oh...it's in latex. They go back to the site and look at our
handy latex quick reference and then make the changes.

Oops, they don't have a latex environment to test it. Now they have to
go build the LaTeX tools. Ok, that's done, now they test it and it
fails. They figure out the errors, make the corrections, and now they
can finally commit it to the repository.

Or...alternatley...they don't bother trying to test it, and commit it to
the repository broken, and someone (probably the lead) has to come along
behind and fix all the broken markup before a new release can be made.
In that setup we certainly can't automate updating the site code. (We
could of course try to force it to build before allowing the commit, but
that just takes us back to scenario 1).

Now, for someone who just wants to note that a single command has
changed from X to Y are they really going to go through all of this?
No, somewhere along that path they're going to decide it's not worth it,
and it's not going to get done.

--




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