I'm not convinced of the value of comments on the Wiki documentation
pages and I was wondering if they should be removed?
Comments are extremely useful during the proposal process, and for
pages that have a relatively small lifespan. But personally I feel
that some of the more permanent pages suffer under the weight of
comments that just don't add any value to the primary content.
Consider the 'Quickstart' page - already it is quite large due to the
code examples and explanatory text. But over half of the page is now
taken up with comments that either point out discrepancies (which are
made redundant the minute the document is revised), double-posts (or
mistyped posts) that can't be removed by the poster, or one-liners
that are probably more suited to a mailing list.
Given that the Wiki is now being used as a reference tool more and
more frequently, I think it would be more productive to restrict work-
in-progress comments or perhaps run them in parallel on separate pages
(like A List Apart's separate 'discuss' feature). The commenting
feature is wonderful when it's used to help community members
collaborate on a document but can create a lot of confusion and noise
for those simply coming to grips with the framework.
Does anyone else share this opinion?
--
Simon Mundy | Director | PEPTOLAB
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