[drupal-docs] opml vs weboutliner?

[Vladimir Zlatanov]

> > OK.  So we drop that.
> 
> Well, I wouldn't drop it /that/ quickly <g>. If I'm the only one who's 
> against it, then I should be heartily ignored or forced to defend.
Well, not the only one, I have big reservations that OPML and similar will actually 
work for docs sync.

> > Other than not liking OPML itself/perhaps some of the people connected
> > with it, can someone think of a format/tool that could meet these
> Define "sync back to the Drupal mothership". At this point, I'm not 
> seeing any reason to use OPML (or any sort of XML) as opposed to just 
> using a regular old text editor and regular old text. How would the 
> syncing work in OPML? How would the core docs understand which section 
> of the new data is which? We'd have to use IDs of some sort, of none of 
> the OPML editors mentioned allow control over that.

For automated syncing, your folksonomy work might prove useful.
Folksonomy + "interwiki style" cross linking is something which might
work. That is find related documentation, which is not included yet
in the 'official' documentation by a selected wizard ;)

Heavily structured cross-site syncronisation looks too complex to me, to
be feasible. Don't forget that most of the external docs come from
service providers, their priorities lie with their cleints, first and
foremost. This means that the documentation will need to be tailored to
fit into the 'mothership' by a human.

In Brussels, in the Wikipedea presentation there were expressed 
interesting a few interesting ideas. One of them was that although
the wikipedia project uses wiki for authoring, they think that 
for stable pages a different organisation or storage and access 
method might prove more useful and they are looking into that
at the moment.

I think distributed authoring faces similar problems - they
are not so technical, but social. Who are your users, why
do you write it, etc... And these impose weird requirements
on structure, if you want too much control over that.

I would say - help with introducing structure, and fixate
only the really stable bits. This will produce a skeleton and
a lot of feathers around it. But it will be helpful.