Documentation - I will explain the only realistic solution below but let me start by saying what does NOT work (...if you're impatient you can jump down to the headline "The solution").
There are two main routes that might seem reasonable great but are really cul-de-saqs: "The lonesome cowboy" whom well-intentioned attempts to write, create or assemble comprehensive "how to use TW", "plugin collections" or one-stop-shops to cover it all. This works for limited matters, such as an intro for beginners or docs for some particular tw-application or "my own plugins", but not for TW at large because it is too big and changes continually. Heartfelt attempts have been made, in the TW community* for a decade*, and they have all been lovely for a short while and soon thereafter withered and failed. "Manual community efforts"; The main attempt is/was probably tiddlywiki. *org* <http://tiddlywiki.org>. There you have an actual wiki that anyone can edit. I think it was either Daniel or Simon Baird who started it many years ago and Tobias Beer gave it a substantial face-lift a few years ago. Really wonderful attempts - but, still, it never took off. This is a strong indication why something like a Mediawiki is NOT a good enough idea. The exact *reason *for why it doesn't work is another matter. tiddlywiki.com is a bit of a combo of the above; one lonesome cowboy taking responsibility and with occasional help from fellow community members. The result is by far the best we've got and IMO very impressive - but still, as evidenced by this thread, it is not enough. So... what CAN work? Take a look at Erwans Community Search <http://erwanm.github.io/tw-community-search/>. This is not intended for aggregating documentation but for listing available plugins and finding tiddlers with some specific characteristic - and only from TW's where their authors have given approval for listing. The Community Aggregator says (scroll down on default tid) it was updated "2nd December 2016 at 4:48 (15 hours ago)." ...which I guess would mean that non of the TW's it's fetching from has been updated since August (tab Recent). This tool has assembled 10.000+ tiddlers and keeps on making sure they're updated - and here comes my main point in bringing this up in our discussion: It would be impossible to manually do the job that Erwans tool is doing. It demands automation. If we want documentation that is comprehensive and up to date, this is impossible by such very manual means. Even Wikipedia, with it's *many *contributors is not without errors and stumps. And while docs for TW is a much smaller project, it still relies on those knowledgeable enough to write the docs (technically and linguistically) so this means we're down to... well, not many people. *The solution*... IMO ;-) ...is what we've already taken the first steps with, namely: TWederation / Federation / Linked TW's, whatever you want to call it. This could be an infrastructure where you "aggregate" documentation from other TW's, on topics that concern you, and very easily add your own public notes to - even just comments, ratings or other meta data. This can then, in turn, be fetched by others. And you could have the fetched documentation automatically filtered such as by prioritizing certain authors, or later/more updated posts, or even if the post was authored in a TW with the same version number as yours. Even super small contributions like *tagging *a post, for your own benefit, will be of value for others and there could be a global directory of tags (topics). Actually, on an individual level it is not even necessary with a comprehensive documentation. The only important topics are the ones you care about. So you only fetch those, (perhaps by filtering on tags). And, because this particular documentation will more likely be shared with like-minded individuals, there should be more specialization of particular areas of knowledge, which I believe is a more encouraging context to share notes/docs in. BTW, we can probably even design it so that you can add to the documentation by asking questions in it! I could go on and on about TWederation because I really think it is the most realistic way that we can solve this ongoing difficulty with documentation (...and much more). I hope to get back working on it soon but the basic bricks are already in place and anyone is welcome to join in. Development of it is not easy, yet, because this is uncharted territory. <:-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to tiddlywiki@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/e46c8792-3e0e-452d-b8c1-e803a72bac38%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
