[documentation] Proposal for handbook maintenance automation

[Kieran Lal]

On 8/8/07, Steven Peck <sepeck at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The handbooks are a wiki for people with appropriate rights.  There
> are 98 of these people currently.  http://drupal.org/node/109372
>
> current from: http://drupal.org/handbook/new-contributions
> "In the past week, a total of 25 handbook pages were created. Of
> those, 18 were spam. Of the 7 added, 5 were created by people not on
> the documentation team:"
>
> Before moderation was taken out, I did in fact open the handbook up to
> editing to a wider role.  The moderation behavior was very annoying
> but the simple fact is page vandalism was worse then the above
> statistic.


I don't see captcha on D.O. but I do see it on groups.drupal.org.  Perhaps
good captcha could reduce the effort.  I applaud you for trying to make an
improvement.

I am not resistant to the idea of 'trusting the people', I have
> experienced the reality of wide open edit access and the vandalism it
> resulted in and frankly have no desire to repeat it.  It was a huge
> time sink.


Can you define the wider role, all authenticated users?


If companies are spending millions of dollars, then they can pay some
> coders who understand FAPI to help with those documentation updates.
> Frankly very few understand FAPI enough to write it clearly and most
> of those do so from a developer point of view.  I certainly don't.


Well they are spending millions and it's not happening.  I funded the
original FAPI docs to support the biggest user experience problem with
Drupal, upgrading.  With 50 comments or more, it's clear that the community
has risen to the challenge of improving these docs.  But it's the
implementation that is preventing this success.


> Versioning.  Versioning is hard.  Not the least because it can involve
> duplication of content but because one persons contribution are often
> not something that everyone has the interest in updating.  I don't
> have access to cPanel nor am I interested in cPanel setup docs, but
> someone contributed it for (say version 4.7).  So hopefully someone
> who is interested will update it...  The volume of pages in the
> handbook is staggering.


Good ;-)


> I'll have a seperate post on a path that I am pursuing.


Looking forward to it.

Kieran


-sp
>
>
> On 8/8/07, Laura Scott <laura at pingv.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Aug 8, 2007, at 11:33 AM, Kieran Lal wrote:
> > I think all the documentation should be a wiki.  Click here to
> edit.  Give
> > admins the ability to lock pages, were necessary.
> >
> > The current status of having 50 comments on a page for something as
> critical
> > how to upgrade your module to the next API version, is completely
> > unacceptable.  We are forcing companies and admins to spend collectively
> > millions of dollars on upgrading their sites between versions with
> > inconsistent and unclear documentation.
> >
> > Agree on this 100%.
> >
> > Something sepeck and I discussed at OSCMS was that all the versions are
> > intermingled, and that ideally we would have handbook views by version
> > number, and done in a way that avoids massive node duplication in order
> to
> > effect hierarchy.
> >
> > The handbooks are a particularly tough challenge. Wonder if what we
> really
> > need are tabbed views for each page, with each tab offering potentially
> > version-specific info. Even in a wiki, that approach might be helpful
> from a
> > usability standpoint. The tagging alone gets us part of the way there.
> >
> > Laura
> >
> >
> > --
> > Pending work:
> > http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> > List archives:
> > http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
> >
> --
> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
>



-- 
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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