Other than Pm's fair attempt at an answer, and his welcome suggestions for improving the cookbook, most of the responses to my post were pretty inane. No offensce, but really...
1) Despite the fact it is true all of us actively using the PmWiki mail list like mail lists (or we wouldn't be here) the 700 people a day visiting the PmWiki site are clearly not all on this list. We have what, maybe 40-50 active developers sitting around and answering each other's emails. What about the hundreds, or thousands that don't have time to plough though scores of PmWiki emails every day to keep up with things (probably the vast majority of users)... 2) The PmWiki FAQ/Question page is atrocious. I think we'd be better off deleting it than have it on the PmWiki page. I'm sorry, but that is about the worst example of poorly organized information I've ever seen. 3) The lousy quality of the FAQ page is no proof the mailing list works. It's just proof we have a lousy FAQ system. The fact we frequently get asked the same questions on the mailing list is probably better proof the mailing list doesn't work. I mean, yes, people get answers fast--but they are not searching the archives. I've tried the archives many times. They don't work for me. It's hard to find stuff. PmWiki can and should do better. Much better. 4) While the cookbook helps some it is itself getting a bit unweildy. Pm has been slowly making some good changes in this area, but I have thought for a long time we need to start categorizing the information there. Perhaps a section for recipe scripts, a section for config questions, one for markup issues. Rankings, culling out stuff not maintained, whatever. Information is only as good as its taxonomy. Well, I don't know. Sounded good. But effective classification helps alot. The cookbook (IMO) is far over extended, and would be much better if it stuck to specific kinds of solutions, etc. 5) The idea a wiki is better than a forum is also nonsense. If you read my post, I suggested we do one in PmWiki. We can keep it as editable as we want, so if info needs to be changed, you just change it. Delete a thread. Add a comment. Whatever you want. With all the bright thinkers on this list we should be able to come up with something! 6) For those who don't want to check the forum, it could easily be set so all posts are forwarded to the Mailing List for the rest of us email junkies. If they have an email address we could just cc them the answer. No guarantee the information would get in the Forum, but if Pm ever gets the email to wiki converter going, we could work on making that happen too. And a good forum might build it's own community of question answerers. Especially if people can find stuff there easily. 7) When I used Drupal, they had an excellent forum area and I used it any time I had a question. Their mailing list was way to busy for me. And getting answers out of their forum was quick and helpful. Beat the socks off the search system for the PmWiki maillist. I may be wrong, but I think a well organized forum would be a boon to the PmWiki documentation system. Ok, if you don't like the word Forum, think of it as a classification system for FAQ's. It's all about organizing information. I know wiki's are kind of freeform, but we're not such anarchists we can't stand for a little organization somewhere? (No offence Pm, you've do a great job--I'm only talking about others in the community who knock off ideas like actually trying to organize our FAQ page). As Neil did with his silly little AQ post (more clutter to the PmWiki site), I decided to put my suggestion into practice also. It took about 5 hours instead of 5 minutes, but I set up a beta version of a PmWiki forum. I'd be willing to change it to a PmWiki FAQ system or whatever if that relieves some of you. If no one finds such an idea useful, I'll drop it. It was pretty cool setting it up... You can see it at http://www.fast.st/pmwiki/index.php Still pristine, but pretty much fully functional. Feel free to test it out. I'm still very much interested in exploring this, despite the negative feedback so far. We've had enough people on the list complain of email overload, I know there's a need for something like this. If any are interested in helping to support this, I'll share webmaster privileges, and I'm very open to suggestions for improving this. (It already has unlimited topics, questions, editable comments, and I even threw in instant messaging between members just for the fun of it. No email yet, but could very easily add in ZAP's newsletter system for managing small mail lists around specific topics. Or have a button to automatically add/remove lines on the Site.Notify page. Also, as it uses Hg, it would be a cinch to set up subtopics, like Recipes:ZAP or Skins:Evolver, or whatever. Feedback? Cheers, Dan PS. If Pm isn't interested in supporting something like this, I might be willing to with some help. Perhaps we could switch the FAQ link on the PmWiki home page to a future version of this, with whatever notices are necessary to not confuse it with Pm's superb craftsmanship. But really, it should be at PmWiki. _______________________________________________ pmwiki-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users
