Hi all, I had a few ideas about collaborative content creation for the website and the documentation project recently, and thanks to Carol's forethought, we have the means to do this at our fingertips.
Problem: Writing docs takes ages, and there are not enough people to do it all, and docs often need little retouching at the end that has to be communicated to the original author, and takes time to integrate, and so on. Solution: For a given topic, create a wikipage. Make a start on it (sketch paragraphs/sections, basically set up the bare bones of what is needed). And then propose that lots of people make small contributions to it. We have a wiki (many people might not know that - it's at http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp), which allows just such collaborative effort to take place. On every page in the wiki, there is a link at the bottom to edit the page. Pages are plain text formatted by the wiki motor afterwards into nice looking html. Formatting is very easy - for example, the equivalent of <h2>Header</h2> in the wiki is == Header == Simple. The problem becomes how to let people know what docs need work at that particular moment, and how to get people working on it. Suggestions to address this point are welcome. My idea is to have a WikiWordOfTheDay. A WikiWord is a word made up from joining several words together with capitalisation - the word automatically becomes a link to a newly created (empty) wiki page. The wiki word of the day (which might not change every day, and might die as an idea if no-one adds any content) would be posted as part of the topic in IRC, and mailed (perhaps only once a week) to the mailing lists to encourage contributions. So there's the idea. To work, it'll need the cooperation of the documentation team, the web team and the user and developer communities. One of the things that we need in the web-pages and the docs now is content - and this is one way of distributing the load. As I said, any other ideas how to address this problem are welcome. Objections, for whatever reason, and suggestions for wikiwords of the day to get things started, are also welcome. To get things started, here's a first WikiWordOfTheDay: http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/WikiWordOfTheDay And a second, as an example of the kind of content I'd like to see: http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/GettingStartedWithGimp Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary, Lyon, France E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
