Don Mitchell wrote: > I wanted to comment on the recent thread about the Vim wiki > front page and its usefulness. I was disappointed to see the > old Vim Tips site go away, but glad to see them carried on > here. However so far the wiki has failed to meet my needs. > I think it's turned into a good reference, but it's not good > at casually improving your Vim skills. What I enjoyed most > with the old site was that you didn't have to browse it. New > suggestions just came in, often a few a day, and certain ones > would catch your eye and you could explore them. The > difference may be slight, but the effect of seeing > (unfiltered and uncategorized) what other people found > important is quite different from just browsing around a list > of categories to find interesting stuff. One requires active > work, the other is passive. Plus once things get categorized > I may ignore them, not realizing they contain a hidden gem. > > The other feature that is missing is the ability to get > recent tips "sent" to you in an RSS feed. I haven't figured > out this wiki's RSS capabilities, but it seems that none of > them present you with a nice clean view of new or recently > edited tips in full or that match certain keywords. The > recently added RSS feed would need to ignore slightly changes > and only contain ones that have real new content.
Thanks for the comments Don. I have to agree with everything you've said. It's knowing what to do that's tricky. You probably followed the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list, and know that editing tips at vim.org was never possible, and adding them was stopped because of an avalanche of spam. Also, there was tremendous enthusiasm on the mailing list for setting up the wiki, but then the mail server died, and there was no explanation for several weeks. Finally, an announcement on vim.org heralded the arrival of vim_use on Google Groups. I think that all enthusiasm for the wiki died with the mail server (all group momentum was lost) - only a few die hards carried on. The good feature of the wiki is that tips CAN be renamed, edited, and mistakes fixed. I take your point about the wiki-fear factor, but I would be much happier posting a new tip here than at vim.org, because a blunder can be corrected here. (I've done a lot of fixing of the imported tips and there was a tremendous amount of confusion - one unfortunate posted the same tip FIVE times because he didn't immediately see the result.) An inescapable consequence of the ability to edit is that an RSS feed can't tell you when something significant has happened. Wikia is doing various developments, but I doubt that we'll have a good RSS procedure any time soon. I put the "New tips" link on the Main Page to make it easier for people to browse the new tips. However, it's infrequently updated and there aren't the stream of new tips and comments that you miss. It's true that many of us have promoted the idea of removing junk comments (particularly me). However, I think that comments in new tips should be left for a month or more (except, if a comment fixes a problem in a tip, and I can see that it does, I edit the tip and remove the comment). So the brutal fact is that we can't provide a useful RSS, and we don't yet have the crowd to generate interesting new content. > It also needs to be extremely easy to add a new tip. I only > added a few over the years and commented on several I think, > but creating a whole page the wiki for a tip or editing > someone else's work may frighten off some people and keep > them from commenting on it at all. Perhaps we can help with a simple example of what the wikitext for a new tip might look like (on the "Create a new tip" link on the Main Page). However, it is unfamiliar, and the more we try to explain it, the more complex it becomes. We hoped that keeping the "Comments" section at the bottom of each tip would encourage people to say whatever they wanted there, without needing to worry about editing someone else's work. I'm not denying the accuracy of your report - I'm just wondering what to do. Maybe we should reopen the forum where a more traditional chat could occur. However, the fundamental problem is that we haven't attracted a crowd. I also wonder whether the group that kept the old Vim Tips site going would ever transfer over here. Probably, many of them participated more from habit and a feeling of community. They probably no longer have the need to find new tips, and don't need a new community. John _______________________________________________ Vim-l mailing list Vim-l@wikia.com http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/vim-l
