Tom's rant re suggestion

[Tom Davies]

Hi :)
I think it's all about as user-friendly as it's reasonably possible to get.  Any more so might mean the tags get used by people outside the team too properly and might lead to confusion.  

I'm not sure that making it any more user-friendly would really help as main barrier to wiki-editing seems to be attitude.  Once people do dare to try it they generally remark on how much easier it is than they expected.  

I don't know anything about Gwibber and i'm a bit of a sheeple in my attitude wrt to it.  I'd be looking for the forum, mailing list or irc group or whatever to see if anyone else is working on it and then see if i could join in with them or at least find a group to get suggestions from and  maybe learn from.  

I guess it's because i feel it's reasonably easy to undo or correct errors in documentation (especially wiki-editing) but possibly trickier with any coding.  
Regards from 
Tom :)  




________________________________
 From: Martin Dixon <mh.dixon at btinternet.com>
To: Tom Davies <tomdavies04 at yahoo.co.uk> 
Cc: Ubuntu Doc <ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com> 
Sent: Saturday, 14 September 2013, 20:18
Subject: Tom's rant re suggestion
 


Hi Tom:)
Your rants struck a chord - I have coding background (18+ years -
    operator, coding, systems and support with ICL) and 
have recently briefly amended html to make page layouts fit better
    on my (btck) web site, but I am cautious of doing a mischief to
    others valuable work. 
As you may be aware of my recent efforts (Saucy doc review) I will
    use Gwibber as an example - 
I could probably have found the coding points at which the Gwibber
    lens was mentioned
but my ME leaves me doubting the sense of "fiddling in the dark"
    when making an on page comment and I find bugs "bug" me seriously.
So what's my point - if you are serious I am willing to trial any
    suggestions (post 13.10 release) to find a way of making this
    suggestion user friendly.
Hope this makes sense.  Martin



On 14/09/13 19:19, Tom Davies wrote:

Hi :)
>I tend to think it's harder to post a bug-report than to edit
        the page, such as to leave a note at the end of the page or just
        after the bit that didn't work.  
>
>However i am beginning to believe what Jonathon just pointed
        out.  I think perhaps 2 main reason but probably others too;
>1.  even a lot of trained documenters can't cope with coding,
        even wiki-markup is scary to a lot of folks
>
>2.  people are too shy and worry about messing things up if they type in a couple of words into a page
>< off-topic rant>
>
>Perhaps feeling they have to be submissive to some higher authority or something.  It drives me nuts.  I'd hoped it was just in my country but i'm beginning to think even people in democracies (if there are any) bow to their 'superiors'.
>
></ off-topic rant>
>
>
>
><new rant>
>
>It's as though people have never heard of or used wikipedia or wiki's, as though they are all tooo new despite having been around since the last century.  
>
></ new rant>
>
>Anyway, the point is that these tags clearly come from a higher
        authority than an average user so they will give sheeple and
        normal users much greater confidence in the pages that are not
        tagged as being for unsupported versions.  It will also give
        normal users the correct impression, that they can complain to
        the higher authority and it encourages them to find one of the
        many ways they could do so.  So it benefits 2 groups we need to
        reach without harming those that already "get it".    
>
>Regards from 
>
>Tom :)  
>
>
>
>
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