Hi On Friday 11 May 2007 04:16:05 Rajko M. wrote: > Today I found one article > http://en.opensuse.org/Installation_without_CD > moved to SDB, as it was tagged with template > http://en.opensuse.org/Template:Movetosdb > > I copied article back to original location leaving the one in SDB > untouched, and changed template a bit, to temporary fix the wording. > > That brought me to think about the purpose of SDB. > It was one time when Support Database was source of many solutions that > helped us, and inclusion in openSUSE wiki was great present from SUSE. > While SDB is better organized there is no many authors that write for it > and even those that do don't look often in > http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Howto > as rules are adding complexity to those for writing ordinary articles.
Like the structure of an article, the focus of an easy description etc. ... > My question is;"How to define the purpose of SDB?" The SDB is the first place where a User should search for a solution for the problem he/she have. It is usually written for beginners so it needs a special style. > At the moment it is more like archive of solutions for previous SUSE > releases. It is very little added since it was included in openSUSE. Should > we maintain that status, and ask contributors to write normal articles in > main space and when time passes and new release comes out move/copy those > in the SDB structure. I would like to see some articles, for example enabling XGL/Compiz in the SDB. But, don't get me wrong: it's an good article/howto which shows all information i need, the article is not really in the SDB style, for example: - "Loading Xgl/Compiz with selected plugins" is not what you really need, a separate article would be better. - " New Xgl/Compiz Packages" - nice link, but you don't need it. There should be something like "If you want to try the latest packages, you can add ....". In this style it suggests me that i need it. - i would separate the article for 10.2 and 10.1 because the configuration is quite different. Users fear long articles, even it's for different versions. Showing a user a small article i will get "wow, that seems not that hard ... ", on a longer article "wow, that is a lot of information". It doesn't matter if most of it is for different versions or stuff you usually don't need, the first look is decisive. To much information confuses the user, and they will start to try out the stuff you described, even they don't need to. You don't want that ... if the user want more, ok, but if the Problem is "How to enable XGL/Compiz" (which is a bad title if you have no clue what XGL/compiz is ...) he/she should get exactly this and links to other pages for more. and because now i'm talking about it, here is an example how it could look like in _my_ opinion http://en.opensuse.org/User:Mlasars/SDB:Enable_the_3D_desktop_(XGL/compiz) (some links are broken, more links needed for beryl etc ...) If there are suggestions how to improve the SDB:Howto, please let me know ... -- with kind regards, Martin Lasarsch, Core Services SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5 90409 Nürnberg GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.opensuse.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
