Fallibility (was Re: Forum integration )

[Peter Garrett]

On Mon, 5 Jun 2006 16:10:28 -0700
Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com> wrote:

[snip]

> The community in general would benefit from some more formal approach to
> quality assurance regarding Q&A.  Too often I see incorrect or misleading
> information given out by community members when authoritative and correct
> answers are available in documentation, the wiki, etc.  I don't think
> there's any shortage of official answers, but somehow they don't reach the
> people who are giving out answers informally.

While I agree with the sentiment, it seems to me that this is inevitable,
at least to some degree. People will continue to give advice with the best
of motives, but they will get it wrong at times.

On IRC, for example, we often see  quite experienced and knowledgeable
users, who perhaps have recently migrated from another distro, giving
advice that is not quite appropriate for Ubuntu. To an extent we have to
rely on Ubuntu people to correct the errors.

That said, I certainly agree that we should be vigilant about such
corrections, and point people to the documentation and the wiki.

I'm not sure how we would implement a "more formal" approach - it seems to
me that this problem is inherent in the open approach to support and help
that the community has always used. (I mean the "Free and Open
Source Software community" in general, not just Ubuntu.)

Peter

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