[doc] Moin Categories

[Enrico Zini]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 12:34:50PM +0100, Ben Edwards wrote:

[Ben quote has been reordered]

> > From debtags, we've seen that categories work better when they are
> > contextualized: it's called faceted categorization and it's a common
> > concept in library science.
[...]
> > CategoryNewbie          -> CategoryAudienceNewbie
> >                        -> CategoryAudienceAdvBeginner [1]
> >                        -> CategoryAudienceCompetent [1]
> > CategoryDeveloper       -> CategoryAudienceDeveloper
> > 
[...]
> So by context you mean audience, platform, style?

No: I mean saying that the tag "Newbie" identifies what kind of audience
the document have, and not, for example, what kind of audience the
documented application has.  By putting the facet, the tag is framed
into a context that gives it an exact meaning.

> My initial idea was to have no more than 15 categories/tags,
> preferably under 10. The idea of this was that it is easy to learn
> them all (remember initially they will be types in as free text
> search).  Also having a relatively small number would mean in the
> future if a search was developed they would all fir on the screen,
> with check boxes next to them.  The user could then see exactly what
> was available.
> Basically I was trying to make the Tags broad and the number small -
> one of my reasons was that the simpler it is the more likely it would
> get used.

I agree on having low numbers.  A useful measure is 7+/-2 items, which
roughly reflects the size of our short-term memory[1]: mental tasks
involving more that such amount of indifferentiated and ungrouped items
are generally hard.

Considering however an interface in which those tags are inputed using a
drop-down menu for each facet, or as in debtags-edit, a 2-levels popup
menu, we can work with like ~5 facets with possibly no more than 10 tags
each.

The approach is similar as you say (tags broad and their number small),
only it would have a small number of facets with broad coverage because
of their tags.

As the new Wiki will be put in place, we'll see how much freedom we'll
have on this, and we can try and make some mock-up of the two
interfaces.


> I also have a bit of an issue with having 'Beginner' & 'Advanced
> Beginner' - it seems a bit too subjective to me.  The idea of
> CategoryNewbie was that is is fairly well defined as a walk through
> document that douse not assume pre-knowledge.  This is therefore a
> audience and a style.  I am sure there are lots of academic arguments
> why having the tag meaning these two things is bad but I was trying to
> be pragmatic.

You're right, I totally agree: "Advanced Beginner" and "Competent
Performer" are utterly awful; their description however still quite
makes sense.   How about "Newbie", "Normal user", "Power user" and
"Expert" instead?

The idea is that the four of them need different documentation:

 - For the newbie, you need to tell every single button they need to
   click, because they've never seen it
 - For the normal user, you may want to provide cheat sheets and basic
   troubleshooting, to support daily use
 - For the power user, you document shortcuts, macros, how to get some
   information about the state of the system, some customization, to
   help in being more productive and in being more effective in solving
   problems
 - For the expert, you show scripting, APIs, administration and
   everything someone passionate about it may possibly want to learn,
   because they always want to know more.

I agree, however, that it may be difficult (although extremely
effective) to produce documentation which is well targeted to only one
of these groups.


Ciao,

Enrico


[1]
Easy to read info about this in the last section of
http://people.debian.org/~enrico/talks/2004linuxtag/zen-paper.html
--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico at enricozini.org>
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