David Boyes wrote:
No, I understood what he meant. I was expressing a sincere dislike for
diluting the discussion here with Yet Another Place to check for
things that interest me.
Doing the discussion using the discussion tools in Mediawiki is a
significant step backward in function in that I have to use their
editor and their encoding, and I can't take advantage of any of the
editing and indexing tools I've developed over the years, The MW
editor is really crude and not really very well adapted to keyboard-
oriented users.
I guess I'm just getting less tolerant of things that use my time
unwisely. I'd like to contribute, but the tools are so far away from
what I spend most of my day doing that there's a lot of impact to how
effective I can be. I could write comments and stuff in text files and
then upload it, but at that point I might as well just post it to this
list.
It's a useful project. I just don't think the discussion tools in the
wiki are very good.
Good or not, they can provide a record of why things were done and why
they were done the way that were.
On a list, discussion can peter out quit quickly, even when a matter
remains unresolved, errors will never be corrected if they're not
corrected quickly, and out of date information is never updated. Even
the diligent can get out-o-date information.
A discussion thread I know of on the woodwork forums has been running
for five years or so. It describes some problems with a particular piece
of machinery, and fixes for those problems. As the model was improved
("engineering changes") the information has been updated. That kind of
maintenance cannot work on a list like this. Such a discussion about an
ongoing product (eg a wiki) has some advantages over a list, especially
a general list such as this.
The woodwork forum is hosted with vbulletin, and it's normal that
participants in a thread get notification of updates to threads they
have participated in, and one can also subscribe to threads without
posting to them.
If someone wants to participate in the maintenance of the wiki, they
should establish a regular time, maybe once a week, to have a look at
what discussions are taking place. It won't have the same kind of
responsiveness as a list, but short response times are not always an
advantage.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
[email protected] [email protected]
-- Advice
http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375
You cannot reply off-list:-)
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