2009/3/29 Andre Roberge <andre.robe...@gmail.com>: > I have been given permission to edit the edu-sig page > (http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/edu-sig/) on the official > Python web site. Think of me as the Benevolent Edu-Sig Slave For Now, > answering to the community as to what changes you'd like to see being made > on that page. > > So, I am looking for community input as to what kind of changes you'd like > to see. Before you go wild with suggestions, I'd like to share a some > observations and a suggestion. > > 1. Doing changes to that page involves an official commit to the svn > repository. As other people might be monitoring changes, I don't want to > overwhelm them with tons of small commits.
Please don't worry about this. Go wild. Do what's right for yourself and the edu-sig community, please don't worry about people watching the changes fly by. We're quite used to ignoring email out here. :-) > 2.a) There is a lot of material on that page that is duplicated (sometimes > poorly) with information that can be found elsewhere. For example, the > section "Shells and Editors" contains links to > http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEditors and > http://wiki.python.org/moin/IntegratedDevelopmentEnvironments, in addition > to actual links to a few tools. I like the idea of not having too much duplicate information (which will inevitably get out of sync at some point), but at the same time I would warn for trying to "normalize" this kind of information *too* much. If commonly needed info is three clicks away, most people won't have given up before finding it. > 2.b) Note the "wiki" part of the two links mentioned in 2.a) above. This > means that YOU can edit such pages, without having to send me an email with > you thoughts, waiting for me to act on it, worrying about me selectively > editing the information you submit, etc. > > So, I am thinking that the edu-sig page should become a high level > description of what is available elsewhere and that a lot of the "meat" > should be actually hosted on wiki.python.org - which could be kept up to > date much more easily and much more effectively by the community as a whole. Beware though, wiki pages often go stale without anybody noticing for a long time. Another problem with wikis is that well-meaning contributors often insert duplicate information into different places, which will just bewilder the readers. A good strategy to deal with this is to have someone (or several people, if it's a large and active wiki) who watches changes and occasionally cleans things up, perhaps moving things around so that they are linked more logically, adding cross-links, deleting outdated information, etc. Spam probably *won't* be a big problem, except possibly for the wiki's front page (spammers are lazy). Note that the wiki also has a mechanism that can send email when a page is changed. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
