Kind of like we've been trying to do over at http://www.railsdocumentation.org/ to no avail? ;)
It's very hard to get people excited about doing documentation (unless you're offering $$$). Honestly, it's hard (it's very difficult to step out your own frame of reference and think about to write docs for beginners through Rails masters) and it's very time consuming (it's probably one of the few things in Ruby development that has a "build process," that is, edit the docs, run rake doc:rails, check your output, fix things, repeat), and, on top of that, there's very little glory in it (do you see a Rails 2.0 "documentation a day" blog series like you do with all the new features? ;)). I'd be really interested in helping assemble a group of people to work steadily on the documentation. I've pulled in a few people and we've made some contributions, but it's never been formal and it's never been consistent. I setup a BC but it fell to disrepair. I have a Lighthouse that we used to file tickets in that no one fixed. I'd really like to get this stuff going since I have more than enough time now to devote to something like that, but I simply haven't seen all that much interest. As for the Q&A site, that would be cool so long as people had the time and gusto to manage it. It would be a job! (Look at the mailing list and IRC channel; think about all that being channeled into a single site that's supposed to moderated and managed...) I'd be willing to help build it if I'm needed, but I'd (personally) rather devote my time to generating reference documentation than managing a "live resource" like that. --Jeremy On Dec 13, 2007 1:33 PM, August Lilleaas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > That's a good point, really. There is no magic involved, even though > it usually seems a lot like it is, at least when you just got the > idea. > > However, I do think there's some pretty good arguments for making a > new site. This question/answer thing might sound a lot like a forum, > only that this particular page won't look like a forum at all. There's > no categories and boards, and no duplicate posts - the mod team tags > stuff (the community might tag stuff as well, but the mod team needs > to be nazis to make sure things are tagged "properly") and deletes > duplicates. And because it's an "official" site - at least that's what > it should be imo - you can't just forward the problem and say "sorry, > cba to answer" - the goal should be to answer all questions (unless > the question is obviously dumb and breaking Rails conventions, like > accessing sessions in models etc). > > This should ideally be a collection of pretty much all the questions > people might have. You might argue that we'll get tons of dupe posts, > and half the job will be to delete those. But isn't that OK anyway? > I'm a regular on #rubyonrails (IRC), and we're basically being google > for the people there. They don't know what to search for and stuff, so > we're interpreting their questions and giving them an api link or a > google query in 2/3 of the questions. So the deleting-dupe-and- > pointing-out-the-answer to dupe posters is sort a part of the service. > > Repeating myself here, but oh well - forums and mailing lists has no > clean and awesome way of detecting dupes when you get past a certain > amount of posts. Like, if someone posted a question here one year ago, > I doubt anyone is arsed to find that. This is because there's probably > 10% unanswered posts, a lot of duplicates going on, and a lot of posts > with 2-3 retarded answers. This is mostly due to not having nazi- > moderation on dupes and such. And it's not because users are too lazy > to search or anything, they simply don't know what (or how) to search > for. > > So as far as I can see, this is a new concept. Not just for Rails, but > open source projects in general. > > Anyway, new webapp or not, I hope this posting of mine would at least > get a doc team running. Can't see why not =) > > On Dec 13, 5:10 pm, "Jack Danger Canty" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > > > The API is an API, though, and > > > not a sufficient resource for someone completely new to rails, and > > > even completely new to making webapps in general. > > > > Amen! How soon we forget the difficulty of starting out in a new field :-) > > > > Right now we've got three main resources that help newbs learn Rails for > > free: the rubyonrails mailing list (bulgeoning now, perhaps past it's > > usefulness),http://railsforum.com(where 97% of the good answers are by > > Ryan Bates), and RailsCasts (created by Ryan Bates). > > > > There used to be Rails Weenie, which worked almost exactly in the > > question/answer format you're describing, but it seems to have gone the way > > of the wooly mammoth. > > > > So I think you're on to something but we need to be careful not to just > > create another resource. We web developers tend to think that any problem > > can be solved with a website :-) > > > > ::Jack Danger > > > -- http://www.jeremymcanally.com/ My books: Ruby in Practice http://www.manning.com/mcanally/ My free Ruby e-book http://www.humblelittlerubybook.com/ My blogs: http://www.mrneighborly.com/ http://www.rubyinpractice.com/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Core" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
