Hello dev team, I'm following up on a brief discussion I had with the CouchDB twitter account (my handle: @pokstad) regarding the official ASF wiki for CouchDB.
I'm a CouchDB evangelist in both my personal projects and at my full time job at a large engineering company (not Atlassian, lol). When I advocate CouchDB, the main thing that becomes frustrating is the lack of quality documentation. The CouchDB Guide by J. Chris Anderson was a great introductory resource, but the current draft version is so out of date that it's not a great resource to introduce new users to couch IMO. I believe part of the reason for the lack of documentation is the lack luster moinmoin wiki. Obviously, being a huge fan of CouchDB I am a big proponent for OSS, but I feel that the moinmoin wiki is hurting the CouchDB community. It's a very unattractive interface and it is difficult to navigate the wiki. While these concerns may not be huge issues for the person(s) who chose this wiki, I believe it raises a barrier to entry for less-technical potential contributors (e.g. myself). CouchDB is also about a community of developers and users, and Atlassian has been working very hard on making the current Confluence release more and more social. I know this sounds like a tired buzzword, but consider this: Atlassian supports blog entries for users of a wiki space. Right now, there are many couchdb blog entries scattered about the web on many different managed sites. What if members of the CouchDB wiki space were permitted to write blog entries about anything they want? Not just structured documentation, but also a well designed hub for anything couch related. This could really unify couchdb articles. Also, the newest confluence has support for twitter like #hashtags and @mentions that can be used for tagging articles/pages and alerting users. Also consider this: Confluence has a Flash/HTML5 plugin that would allow users to collaborate on architectural drawings to illustrate CouchDB use cases better. Anyway, I'm really excited about CouchDB and I really want to contribute to the global documentation out there, but MoinMoin ain't making it easy. I really think that a move to a better documentation tool could be a huge push to CouchDB's adoption. Thanks for listening. -- Paul Okstad
