In an ideal world, interested parties fix things on the wiki when they find they have problems. And I'm heartened there's been a spate of link-fixing contributions recently, system working the way it's supposed to :)
Does it make any sense to think about any kind of more systematic maintenance activities? Is wiki (content) maintenance even a possible thing? They are generally pretty notorious for this: it's a wiki, you can update it, but if you didn't just update it it's probably out of date and inaccurate. There are really two things... - errors. links go stale all the time, is there any point in looking for a tool that could crawl the wiki infrequently (on the order of once every many months) to test if links outside the wiki still resolve to something and report problems? - quality. Here are a couple of examples I ran into just this morning looking at some things that landed in the inbox. The page on beginner errors: https://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnerErrorsWithPythonProgramming got an update (broken link fixing only), and I was curious and looked at it. It's not terribly useful as is - the notes also indicate it was imported from elsewhere. This *could* be a very useful page: as a python-tutor participant, I see common themes repeatedly; it would also be great to hear from instructors on what trips students up (I haven't taught a Python class since 2002 so I don't have any current contributions on that front). This page tried to do that, but then goes off in strange weeds... "The latter issue has been fixed, but the former has not and very likely never will". Python is what it is, how about ideas for how to teach people in an anticipatory way to avoid well-known gotchas instead of focusing on how the language might or might not be "fixed"? Page still has references to "Python 3000", which means it's, ummm, fairly dated :) One of the resources pages, https://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/Programmers also had link-fix activity. this page suffers from the "list of resources" problem, where a bunch of links are just dumped here with no ordering (how do you order them?), and once the lists get more than a few entries, it's hard to know what to follow. And every so often we can expect to go through "moving my link up to a better place" wars like we've seen before. I found the Google class listed in two sections, both with old (but not yet broken) links to obsolete Google Code addresses, cleaned that up on the way past (there's only one copy now). Any thoughts on how resources like this could be made more useful? Maybe keep a wiki page of "if you feel like contributing to Python, here are some pages that could stand improvement"? -- mats _______________________________________________ pydotorg-www mailing list pydotorg-www@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pydotorg-www
