Yep, the linked paper says similar about other projects that used wiki's
initially, at least relating to the spamming point and a few other things.
Also that they get deemed less "authorative" by the user. Wiki's seem to be
good for games though.
The percentage of contributors seems to vary a lot between projects. They
show:
"... the number of revisions that were motivated by the community: Django:
48%, Hibernate: 10%, and Eclipse: 10%."
One particular quote that stuck with me:
"As users and contributors mentioned, the community is less inclined to
contribute documentation than it is to contribute code, so the barrier to
contribute documentation must be lower than the barrier to contribute code."
Unfortunately I can't offer any solutions though.
Jonathan
On 24 April 2013 10:51, Andrea Aime <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 11:44 AM, Jonathan Moules <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hi Andrea,
>> I wasn't aware of this (I have a couple of "issues" open relating to the
>> documentation) - it may be worth posting to the user-list too.
>>
>> I suspect having the docs in git makes them significantly less accessible
>> than a more conventional wiki, which may explain the lower participation
>> from non-developers. Almost everyone can figure out how to use a wiki in a
>> couple of minutes, but to do the GeoServer docs you need extraneous
>> software (git, or gitextensions for a GUI), an understanding of version
>> control, something that can transcribe ".rst" files (I'd never encountered
>> them before) *and* the willingness/knowledge to actually update the
>> documentation.
>> I'm not saying to convert the documents to a wiki (research* suggests
>> that'd be a bad idea), but you can see how one of these has a much larger
>> barrier to entry than the other.
>>
>
> Actually the GeoServer documentation was originally in a wiki, we switched
> away because of several issues:
> * no one from the user base was contributing anyways
> * the documentation would get spammed regularly
> * we could not maintain a per version documentation, so new features
> available only on trunk were documented on the only documentation we had,
> and people got confused
> * editing long documents in the wiki was a real issue, connection drops
> resulted in good half hours of work getting lost
>
> Other projects went through the same ordeal and eventually made the same
> move and yet they do have non developers contributing to the docs (e.g.,
> MapServer).
>
>
>>
>> * - the Research alluded to is a fascinating paper titled "Creating and
>> evolving developer documentation: understanding the decisions of open
>> source contributors" -
>> http://cs.queensu.ca/~ahmed/home/teaching/CISC880/F11/papers/Documentation_FSE2010.pdf
>> It does a comparison of documentation contribution issues for 19
>> documents for Open Source projects. I'd suggest giving it a read - there
>> are probably lessons in there for how to increase community participation
>> that could help GeoServer.
>>
>
> Nice, I'll have a look
>
> Cheers
> Andrea
>
>
> --
> ==
> GeoServer training in Milan, 6th & 7th June 2013! Visit
> http://geoserver.geo-solutions.it for more information.
> ==
>
> Ing. Andrea Aime
> @geowolf
> Technical Lead
>
> GeoSolutions S.A.S.
> Via Poggio alle Viti 1187
> 55054 Massarosa (LU)
> Italy
> phone: +39 0584 962313
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>
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>
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