First of all, I'd like to thank Bill for all the effort he has put into the Wiki.
In some points I must, however, agree with Antoine. The current Wiki currently is a bit of a mess. There are only a few pages that are of real value. You know, when I started I had hard times to find my way through the information that I was looking for and even now I don't find things that I am looking for in a few clicks. Until somebody posted the BeBold principle to the mailing list I was always hesitating not to edit/delete too much of the existing information, but surely that slowed down improvements to the wiki. Now I am a bit bolder, but it is still hard. If I look now at some pages, I would rather like to see that information organised in a different way, but different from a text in a text-editor, I cannot simply drag & drop text from one page to another. Well, I should have open several browser windows, I know. What is also important is some more structure of the wiki. I am personally used to linear text with sections and subsections, ie, some kind of hierarchy. We should have a number of standard pages that can be edited only by registered Axiom-developers. These pages should not change too much once they are set up. But hey, until now we only had problem with spam, but not with people willingly destroying pages. So restricting the wiki idea at this stage of Axiom is an unnecessary effort, there are too few edits anyway. To ALL: Start improving the wiki pages!!! If you don't like something then change it!!! Bill, what I would like to see on top of an edit page is a link to BeBold. Furthermore, it should be said that the first paragraph of the page is a kind of abstract that is used for the "SiteMap" (which can be considered as a kind of glossary, if you like). Actually, I would also like to have some facility that let's me move the pages in the tree structure of the wiki. Best would be to see the tree and take my mouse to move pages in the hierarchy.
About the new comers : we are competing to get their attention and time.
If their is two column I will only read the left one.
I feel the same, but the right column doesn't disturb me too much. In fact, I like it, since it gives related material. Only having both "Site Index" and "Site Map", I find a bit confusing. Maybe one should be called by a more appropriate name. I cannot easily guess what is what. I don't like to see the IssueTracker pages on the siteindex/sitemap. It is too distracting from the hierarchy view.
I want a "Description" two page long maximum with what is Axiom what is special and great about it.
Don't we have it somewhere? Haven't I seen this on one of Tim's pages?
And then I want a Download with maybe some binary but for sure a tgz of the source.
Yes, I have already put a section into SandboxAxiomSource. I just don't know where the .tgz and friends are. Or would just a file be just too huge? In that case we declare on SandboxAxiomSource why we don't give a .tgz file.
Then I am going to look for a good introduction. And I hate it when people give me choice I want the one and definitive introduction.
I think we should take this consideration seriously. Currently "Tutorial" links to "AxiomInterface" (very intuitive!) and gives not a tutorial. I rather think that we should maybe give a weighted list of introductory material. http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~mnd/documentation/axiom_tutorial The above tutorial looks quite reasonable to me. The tutorial page should not be like a sandbox were everyone just adds his/her commands. I hate everything on http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/AxiomInterface that comes after the "That was easy!". It should go away, because it looks unprofessional.
I will read between 5 and 20 pages max. Any document that go over 100 pages will scare me to death.
So the Axiom Book should come at the end of the tutorial under "Further Reading".
And modifying a page is not has easy at it sound. Writing correctly is time consuming and difficult. I never feel like touching other people stuff. You can often see it in a wiki where old information is rarely deleted.
I also felt like it. We all know that we can unroll changes, but what I don't know is, whether everyone can do it. It should be more obvious how things can and will be undone if people are too bold. Another suggestion that should be visible on top of an edit-page.
I also think we should have a mixture of pages that only a few people can edit and freely editable pages. But I strongly think that it is too early to make that distinction. We first need more people who edit at all.
Ralf _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
