There are some reference materials there, especially in the Contributor’s 
Guide. But many of the docs on the wiki also are in draft states. As Bradley 
mentions, the QuickStart is currently getting edited (and my apologies for not 
finding the time to get this done yet) and the comments are valuable at this 
stage. Eventually it will live as a chapter in the manual AND on the main site. 
You’ll notice the site already has a place for it. Another example is the 
coding standards that have been up there for a while. I think the comments 
there are probably the best way to gather community feedback as well. They can 
even be useful on live reference documents, kinda like the comment on php.net 
which are often more helpful than the text itself.

If we have really unhelpful or outdated comments, I can either delete them or 
archive them. Keep in mind that the date is shown on each comment, so it may be 
clear that it’s outdated if that’s the case. Let me know if you see any that 
you think should be addressed.

 

,Wil

 

From: Bradley Holt [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2008 1:26 PM
To: Simon Mundy
Cc: Zend Framework
Subject: Re: [fw-general] Comments on Wiki Documentation pages

 

Simon,

I can't speak for the rest of the wiki content, but I think the QuickStart is 
not intended to permanently live on the wiki, but instead under "docs" in the 
main framework website. Perhaps other parts of the wiki are also 
"works-in-progress" that will find permanent homes elsewhere. In that case, the 
comments serve as a nice history to the document but shouldn't be immediately 
viewable in the documents final state (when it gets moved). Perhaps the real 
issue is that the wiki is being used as a reference tool - I'm guessing that 
wasn't its originally intent (but I don't know for sure). I'm not sure what the 
solution is if that is the real issue.

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 3:38 PM, Simon Mundy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

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

""" " "" """""" "" "" """"""" " "" """"" " """"" "  """""" "" "

202/258 Flinders Lane | Melbourne | Victoria | Australia | 3000
Voice +61 (0) 3 9654 4324 | Mobile 0438 046 061 | Fax +61 (0) 3 9654
4124
http://www.peptolab.com




-- 
Bradley Holt
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to