Hi Marc-Andre, Thank you again for the detailed response.
I would like to challenge your assertion here regarding the ease of making edits. While technically what you say should be true, and it indeed was true, the development ecosystem has evolved in an unexpected way in recent decades. I assert that in this era, in 2025, there is a lower psychological barrier for a technical person (particularly a younger one) to send a PR to a documentation github repo than contribute to a wiki. The evidence I have for this is in my own teaching of software engineering and computer sciences students at one of Australia's most elite universities. Both this and last semester 4-500 students have passed through the software engineering professional accreditation capstone project, which I am heavily engaged with. First hand I can tell you that 100% of these student know how to make a commit, ~75% know how to make a PR, 60%+ will be confident in managing PRs in a github context by the end of their degrees. As compared to when I did my studies, or even when I started teaching this course in 2017 these numbers are incredible, virtually unbelievable, yet it is now the expectation for these graduating university students. Of course all of us as professional software engineers these days must know how to make PRs. As for counter-evidence I don't have such big numbers but I do have the responses of people with whom I've discussed this, which have been firm in the negative, though only anecdotal. I wonder how many takers/responses you get when you drive for editors? -- I do have an idea for a way to get some concrete numbers. I am a moderator of Django discord which has 27.9K members, and I was considering running a poll there (particularly as I would have moderation control of it), but the better place would the be the official Python discord which is one of the biggest discord servers in the world with something like 370K members. It is truly a phenomenon, they are very successful there. I was pondering how/where running such a poll would make sense in that sprawling community, when I noticed that my friend from PSF EOW, KeithTheEE is a moderator in this server (so the story comes around). *How would you feel about the idea of running a poll about the wiki in the python discord?* *Specifically we could ask the question as to what interface would be "easier" for the community there to engage with.* I would be very happy if you wanted to write such a poll. For the record: based on my dealings with wiki.python.org in the last few months I'm a bit concerned that even just asking this question may effectively DDoS the wiki. Irrespective it's unambiguous progress in terms of putting the project in the minds of a pool of potential new editors. --- Elena Williams Github: elena <http://github.com/elena/> On Sun, 2 Mar 2025 at 09:43, Marc-Andre Lemburg <m...@egenix.com> wrote: > Hi Elena, > > such repos are good for documentation, but accessibility is rather limited > and requiring PRs to add/change content will not exactly be an invitation > to people wanting to help curate the content. > > Our wiki provides very easy ways to edit content and we make access very > easy as well. The level of entry is much lower than for a documentation > repo such as the devguide (and I'm not even talking about the necessary CD > to turn the repo into the actual content). > > As mentioned, the tech is not really the problem. It's finding enough > people to engage is curating the content, that is. > > PS: I've tried lots of ways of making content editing easier for > contributors in my day job as CTO, software architect and project lead. By > far the easiest was creating a set of Google Docs, but even with those, it > was hard to find and motivate people to provide and curate content. It's > really a people problem, not a tech one. > > Thanks, > > -- > Marc-Andre Lemburg > eGenix.com > > Professional Python Services directly from the Experts (#1, Mar 01 2025) > >>> Python Projects, Coaching and Support ... https://www.egenix.com/ > >>> Python Product Development ... https://consulting.egenix.com/ > ________________________________________________________________________ > > ::: We implement business ideas - efficiently in both time and costs ::: > > eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH Pastor-Loeh-Str.48 > D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg > Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611 > https://www.egenix.com/company/contact/ > https://www.malemburg.com/ > > > On 01.03.2025 18:22, Elena Williams via pydotorg-www wrote: > > Hello Mats, > > Not using the "wiki" part of a github repo -- I agree this is awful! Upon > exploring this and another upfront fatal flaw is that file trees are not at > all supported. > > Perhaps more following the pattern established here: > https://github.com/python/devguide > https://devguide.python.org/ > > > --- > Elena Williams > Github: elena <http://github.com/elena/> > > > On Sun, 2 Mar 2025 at 04:10, Mats Wichmann <m...@wichmann.us> wrote: > >> On 3/1/25 10:01, Elena Williams via pydotorg-www wrote: >> > Dear Marc-Andre, >> > >> > Thank you for your prompt and detailed response! >> > >> > Would it be an option to consider moving the wiki to github? It's >> > unambiguously demonstrated that these days that content of the scope of >> > the wiki is well within what they are accustomed to. >> There's an absolutely fatal flaw with github-hosted wikis, even more >> than that it's an absolutely terrible wiki implementation: content is >> not made available to search engines for indexing. If we think it's too >> hard for people to find stuff via the wiki now, it would get that much >> harder. On a project I'm involved in, we're actively looking for >> someplace else to put ours, but we're not a funded project so haven't >> found a solution yet. >> >> >> > _______________________________________________ > pydotorg-www mailing > listpydotorg-www@python.orghttps://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pydotorg-www > >
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