Use of discussion pages (was Re: new wiki theme)

[Matthew East]

Hi Duncan,

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 1:25 PM, Duncan Lithgow <dlithgow at gmail.com> wrote:
> Looks good, only improvements as far as I can see.
>
> My only comment would be if it is possible to add a page discussion
> lin to the set of links at the bottom? It would need to automatically
> create a discussion page where one does not exist, I didn't manage to
> get the macro for doing that to work for me.

I agree that if we decide to use discussion pages on a regular basis
for the wiki, it should be straightforward to add a link in the theme.

However, whether to use discussion pages is a question which I think
we need to address. First, Phil has pointed out that discussion pages
have the potential to crowd searches. I will investigate with the Moin
developers whether it is possible to remove particular pages from a
search.

    https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/2008-August/011436.html

Secondly, I have to say that I find discussion pages rather unwieldy
to have a proper discussion of something. Email threads are much
easier to follow and better organised. Also, in order to follow a
discussion page, you need to be subscribed, and there is no guarantee
that an interested party will subscribe to a particular page.

I've been trying for some years to have the documentation mailing list
mirrored on the forums, which would also make them easier to follow
for those who prefer a forum - I'll keep trying with this.

> I was disappointed to see that the WikiGuide page was changed without
> any comment on it's discussion page. This implies that anyone who
> doesn't follow the ubuntu-doc list should not expect to be informed
> about what is happening to the pages to which they are subscribed (I
> am one such person who doesn't want to follow the whole ubuntu-doc
> list as I'm only involved with the wiki.)

To be honest, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone who is
interested in "big picture issues" regarding the wiki to follow the
docteam mailing list. Very often topics are relevant to both the wiki
and our system documentation, and that's the reason we have a unified
list for both those areas of our work.

(I know that you are experiencing some individual issues with mailing
list delivery, so I can only suggest chasing the sysadmins and using
Gmane for now until those are resolved -
http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.doc)

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF