On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 07:55:45PM +0100, Dirk-Willem van Gulik wrote:
Our project is getting value out of the Wiki, in part because we have non-Committers feeling empowered and able to contribute directly.
People can do the same with patches on mailing list; and seem less likely to abuse that. Perhaps the simple validation (and display) of a valid email address may do the trick.
I would say that empirical evidence shows that the Wiki fulfills a need that patches on a mailing list do not. If the mailing list were sufficient, then the Wiki would be empty.
In a sense, with Wiki you automate the "send a patch" approach, since each edition can be isolated down to the patch level.
People that blames the Wiki is not realizing that the only difference between Wiki and patches is that quality control is "ex post" in Wiki (vs "ex ante" with patches).
On the other side patches often pass completely ignored in lists, even important ones (its has happened a couple of times to me). With Wiki, if something gets overseen, it is the "doer" who 'wins', not the "waiter" ;-)
For those still reticent, a (conceptual for the moment) experiment could be done:
-put all the xdocs under Wiki, (or xdocToWiki them in a reversible way :-) ) - Automate a patch with every change and send it to the relevant list - Have a site mirror with the Wiki results. - Sit down (or lay in bed :-( and wait.
We could assess long time quality, human cost and performance. I bet Wiki would win.
(... snip for bandwidth, I fully agree on the analysis)
Regards,
SantiagoP.S.) Andy, feel free to put the xdocToWiki thingie into Wiki, I think it could be an interesting idea to have a way to transform back and forth between Wiki an (a subset of) DocBook, or whatever vocabulary we are using for docs.
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