[documentation] wiki style help pages

[ricco at webulite.com]

Steve,

What you seem to be saying is that I am not missing something. That I
cannot simply sign up to get a "EDIT PAGE" tab at the top of all doc
pages. Assuming you are familiar with how the doc system works more than
me, and your comment was inspired by my post.

If you go to http://groups.drupal.org/WikiHelp, and follow any link to any
page off the front, you will see they are wiki pages, and anyone then just
clicks EDIT, and edits the page (would be cool if groups.drupal.org wiki
pages had the TALK tab implemented and the wiki page content type had a
default to "enable comments read/write, but that is a future feature, not
one currently implemented in the groups.drupal.org world.) And yes,
mediawiki calls what you are talking about a WATCH LIST, and you can sign
up to monitor pages changes. And of course certain mediawiki gods can see
revisions and undo bad edits.

But you see how easy http://groups.drupal.org/WikiHelp pages are to edit?
That was why I set the group up. I don't see what is unDrupal about it...
in fact it seems to be simply a group like the 260 other groups, that
allows members to create wiki pages like the other groups offer. It seems
kind of odd that the moderators would allow a "spain drupal users group"
or many of the other 260+ groups, but not tolerate a "WikiHelp" group. Not
sure how it can hurt things, and it seems like it would be an
experimentation environment that would help shed light on if the drupal
doc group is not getting members because it is too hard to work, or if
simply nobody care about documentation.

I would bet that the WikiHelp group in 6 months would accumulate a great
deal of user input simply because of the ease of it's use.

It sounds like what you are implying is that there is a sort of heavy
monitoring of the ability to edit doc pages, and that the goal is to keep
every Tom, Dick, and Harry from doing updates. If that is the case, I
simply have a totally philsophically different approach to how to get your
user community to maintain and participate in documentation.

So at this point I am trying to determine if it is a matter of I am
missing how to become a documenter, becoming on, and then pointing out how
you folks can change the drupal doc pages so that others that follow can
change drupal doc pages simply by clicking one link... or... if Drupal
purposely does not want every Tom dick and harry changing the docs... In
which case you folks have to decide if you want to allow me to make make
the http://groups.drupal.org/WikiHelp group, and see if i can prove that
the fully open system will give you better docs in the long run... or if I
should just forget about documentation, and go back to just being a Drupal
user instead of trying to get involved with helping with Docs.

Cheers! Ricco

> Seems like a simple text link on top of every doc page that said:
>
> "Click here to help improve this document," or something to that
> effect, with a link to the appropriate page on how to contribute to
> documentation would be nice.
>
> I don't know what the thinking is behind the application for document
> contributors is. Perhaps the hurdle is there to improve the signal to
> noise ratio?
>
> One thing drupal's wiki feature lack is the ability to send out email
> notifications when a page is updated. I think this is a crucial
> feature that's needed before opening up documentation to every Tom,
> Dick, and Harry who wants to change a page. That feature should
> probably implemented before documentation became more open. This would
> make catching bad edits more timely.