Oops, re aptitude : was [Re: Edgy in the news]

[Mario Vukelic]

On Wed, 2006-11-01 at 20:49 -0600, Matthew Copple wrote:
> Why not institute the ubuntu version of a "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" 
> for community-contributed how-tos? 
(snip thoughts about how this could work)

The Ubuntu community documentation seems to face the same problem as
Wikipedia does. I'm not up-to-date but know that they have started to
develop ideas, maybe there is something to learn there.

> I think most users understand that it is "caveat emptor" with the mailing 
> lists (at least the -users list) and the forums. There's just too much 
> bandwidth there to effectively monitor, anyway.

Have you read -users recently? It has changed through a pretty big
influx of new users, many of which are (a) utter Linux newbies, and (b)
barely able to express themselves in English. Of course these are very
good things, but it strains the knowledgeable people on -users of whom
there never have been too many compared to debian-users for example. I
think a big portion of the newbies is too inexperienced to distinguish
good from bad advice, and too many of the regulars have a clue about how
to treat them correctly.
I'm not sure that there is too much bandwith to monitor, the list looks
very bad when scanning it, but a a dedicated group of people could
easily prevent the worst. If one created a set of canned responses for
the repeating problems (there are not that many different ones) and
canned replies for people who give bad advice ("Thanks for helping, but
this is not the correct answer. Please refer to <url> to update you
knowledge on this matter") then one could have a big impact.

> Possibly some sort of recognition program for outstanding and 
> highly knowledgeable users, like the Microsoft MVP program?
(...)
> Another option might be to institute an informal user certification program

Hmmm ... an exclusive email address would be both an incentive and
helpful in the list context. If one sees a response from one of these,
one would know that it is more reliable than from random users