Hi Bertrand,
I for one have been looking at the wiki regularly, making little tweaks here and there: nothing major, but it's a regular haunt of mine. You can verify this at: http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/RecentChanges (S�bastien seems to have contributed a fair bit recently too!)
Back when Outerthought introduced the Cocoon wiki I thought it was a cool tool (hey, not even based on Cocoon!). I liked it and introduced it into my company too: we used it lots. We learned the good and bad of wikis. Later, in my constant search for community enhancing tools, I came across Drupal (a tool that is proving very successful all over the problem space). I'm inventing as little as possible. That is, I'm building on the work of others, at the same time as trying a slightly different approach to that proposed already.
I think that when you suggested, "This is maybe the one tool that we're missing: a way to add folksonomy tags to our docs to make them easier to find", you are touching upon an important weakness of the wiki. The wiki is great for contained ideas and snippets, but very poor at encouraging the organisation of those snippets. With a wiki it is difficult to evolve a taxonomy from the content (yes, there are ways). Bertrand, I know you are a fellow user of del.icio.us and from that, and your statement above, I think we may essentially agree on the potential solution. A "jewel" in Drupal's "crown" is its taxonomy system. Over the next few weeks I'll attempt to demonstrate the benefits of this approach, coupled with folksonomy. Taxonomy is 'expert' pre-defined, folksonomy is community post-defined. I think the latter has enormous potential to help in a community like ours. A bit of both is probably perfect.
I think you are right, I probably have dismissed the "existing stuff" a bit early. In that case, I pledge to keep in touch with the current effort. I certainly value ongoing dialogue. However, I wonder out loud: should we be putting documentation behind the barrier of committership at all? I'm a community post-defined kind of person.
As I said above, over the next few weeks I'll attempt to demonstrate what I imagine to be the myriad of potential benefits of the Drupal approach.
Regards, and thanks! Mark
On 12 May 2005, at 07:33, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote:
Le 12 mai 05, � 06:33, Sebastien Arbogast a �crit :...FYI we have already come up with 13 very interesting ideas about a potention new common documentation effort for Cocoon..
Would you guys be able to at least try writing/reorganizing some docs in the current system [1] before inventing yet-another-potentially-doomed-new-tool?
Excuse the tone and don't get me wrong, I'm trying to be constructive: building on the work of others might get you to destination earlier.
My impression is that you've dismissed the existing stuff a bit early without really trying it. Writing/reorganizing docs is really easy with the 2.2 docs system, and if non-commitership is a problem there's certainly a way to solve it.
Let us know if you have any questions or specific problems about how to write docs for the 2.2 trunk.
-Bertrand
[1] http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/22NewDocumentsGeneration
