I'll try to keep it short but can't help it, I like to write :)
Aaron Mulder wrote:
While I grant that the proposed documentation page is sleeker in
appearance than the current library page, I prefer not to emphasize
any one source of documentation over the others. I am not
recommending that we make the documentation into the table of contents
for my book, nor that we turn it into the index of DeveloperWorks
articles pertinent to Geronimo, nor that we simply make it a list of
Geronimo books available at Amazon or Safari. Yet all of these are
probably valuable to people looking to get started with Geronimo.
Where I am going with this idea is to try to get the things more clear around the web site and get
more people participating in the documentation. I am not claiming as mine the documentation that is
in Confluence, it is the Apache Geronimo's documentation and we ship an HTML version with Geronimo.
Hernan, I don't intend to be rude, but this is the second time you've
proposed this. Can you find a way to construct a nice-looking
documentation page that equally features all the sources of Geronimo
documentation, instead of turning it into a list of articles you've
contributed? I'll be happy to work with you on this if you need help
populating topics or highlights or blurbs for the documentation other
than your own.
I would like to emphasize that I am not proposing to remove any of the current content but rather to
add more content. I think it would be more organized to have online books, printed books,
interviews, etc. listed under "Library" and the documentation listed under "Documentation".
This is the Geronimo documentation. I have been nearly "begging" in the mailing lists for more
people to contribute to the documentation and several people have already contributed. I (I should
say we all) could really use your help filling up some of the blanks in the current confluence based
documentation.
And on the subject of the Confluence documentation, perhaps we (the
community, I know this is not entirely in Hernan's control) should
consider revising the page headers. Right now they tend to include
something like:
"Added by Tom Smith, last edited by Tom Smith ... (bold) Article
donated by: Tom Smith"
I don't think that's actually productive. To be honest, I think it
probably discourages contributions. For example, if someone in the
All wikis behave alike in that aspect. If I create a new page my name will get stuck to that page as
"Added by ..." but it will also reflect the last person who modified it as "last edited by ..." That
is the way the wikis have for tracking changes.
Either way, I agree with you. I would prefer no names at all to be listed and the cool thing about
the cwiki.apache.org is that we can customize the HTML cached view so we will not have to deal with
this issue anymore :)
community writes some content and supplies it as a patch, the page
will still say "Added by (some committer), last edited by (some
committer)". That's not entirely fair. And if someone sees a typo in
an article that says in bold at the top "Article donated by: Tom
Smith", are they supposed to fix it? If so, should it be "Article
donated by: Tom Smith and John Doe" or "Article donated by: Tom Smith
with updates from John Doe" or just leave it as "Article donated by:
Tom Smith" but "last edited by John Doe" or what? Even if we had a
policy I think it would be a mental barrier to actually updating the
page.
Well, you do not need to be a committer to work on any article, you just need to register in
Confluence (just like with any other wiki) and pour your content there. To mitigate the "de facto"
[Added by...] / [last edited by...], the "Article donated by:..." line was manually incorporated to
each article. I thought it would actually encourage more people to contribute. The whole point
behind this idea is to have more people interested in contributing to the documentation.
I also believe that by initially creating a structure/placeholders it should be easier for anyone to
pick a subject and start writing about it as well as providing new topics to cover.
I think it would be better overall if the Wiki documentation pages had
no credits at all, and we just let the editorial history live in the
Info page, and we invite the community to be active in authoring and
updating the Wiki pages. Do others agree? Can that be arranged?
I totally agree with you, we should all be more proactive encouraging the community to contribute to
the documentation too.
I currently don't know how to remove the "WHOs" from confluence but I'm looking
how to do it.
Thanks for the feedback, I know you guys are very busy closing JIRAS.
Cheers!
Hernan
Thanks,
Aaron
On 5/2/06, Hernan Cunico <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi All,
when we updated the web site we mainly focused on the look & feel but
left the existing navigational
structure pretty much untouched.
I propose we update some of the structure starting with the
documentation section. Currently there
are two links pointing to the same resource, these are *Documentation*
and *Library*. Today we have
an official documentation for v1.0 and we are working on the doc for
v1.1, in addition there is the
"Developers Guide" also being developed.
All these are the documentation that should be pointed from the
"Documentation" link. What is
currently pointed from both "Documentation" and "Library" links should
be just pointed from
"Library". We will also need to update the Geronimo Administration
Console to reflect this changes
as the documentation is pointed as the "Additional documentation" link.
The documentation today is hosted on an external site (Atlassian) but
we are working with the ASF
infrastructure team to get a local high performance installation
(cwiki.apache.org). Until we
resolve the ASF local installation I think we could point directly to
the remote articles from our
site. This might be easier to explain by an example so I put together
a copy of the Geronimo web
site with the proposed changes, see "Library" and "Documentation"
links (note that the rest of the
site may not be entirely up-to-date)
Here is the test URL:
http://people.apache.org/~hcunico/site/
I think these proposed changes will facilitate access to the
documentation, increase it's visibility
and hopefully we will see more volunteers to continue developing the
docs.
Thoughts, comments, suggestions!?
Cheers!
Hernan
