A Though on Redundancy of Community Wiki and Other Forms of Support

[cprofitt]

On Mon, 2013-12-02 at 11:27 -0800, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:


> Sure but not all articles are tagged in fact last time I check many
> were not. It is kind of hard for tagging to be effective if the
> contributors needed for such a task are not there.
> 
True, but tagging is a good beginning point. Even if it is done by a
person who was looking to get the answer and found the information
out-of-date.

> That is another problem that being that in discussions I have had with
> other developers there is a general bit of concern that the Wiki often
> gives people incorrect information because of it being outdated so
> frequently.
> 
In the case of community documentation the developers correcting
incorrect answers would be most appreciated.
> 
> With the pace of feature development in any give upstream is it
> practical for us to continue to offer documentation for upstream
> software when we can simply point users to upstream documentation
> instead of trying to maintain it ourselves? So far maintaining it has
> not ever really worked.
> 
If there are good sources of upstream documentation I would agree that
pointing people to that upstream documentation would be ideal. If there
is not a good source then providing community documentation is likely
the best option. Joomla would be one example -- their documentation for
installing on Ubuntu was not good and my offer to update their was met
with no response.

While a community wiki is not an ideal situation it is likely better
than random blogs found through Google searches. The only thing I would
like to see is automatic life-cycle enforcement on wiki articles... but
I am not aware of that being a feature of any wiki.

Charles