[documentation] Proposal to open up editing rights

[Lee Hunter]

There are two features of Wikipedia that I sorely miss in the Drupal docs.

One is the existence of a "Talk" page on a separate tab with each
article. This is one of the best ways I've seen to gather comments and
suggestions. With only the "comments" feature enabled (the status
quo), you wind up with just a linear and sequential view of everything
everyone ever said about the article. With the Wikipedia style Talk
page, anyone could refactor and archive old conversations and you
could put more important stuff (like a "to do" list for the article)
at the top and important contributions to the dialog could be
highlighted and flagged.

The other thing I sorely miss from Wikipedia, is the ability to add
ad-hoc categories and sub-categories. The current information
architecture of the Drupal documentation (especially outside the
developer docs) is - and I'm struggling to be diplomatic here -  just
horrible horrible horrible horrible. And it seems that gaining
consensus for major structural fixes is difficult in this kind of open
source environment. However, if we could use categories like they do
in Wikipedia (it's actually a kind of hierarchical free tagging)  you
wouldn't necessarily have to change the current information
architecture at all. The ability to apply multiple tags and to
organize them in a variety of hierarchies would provide incredibly
useful ways to navigate the information and it would allow people to
organically associate related content. The worst thing about the
current Drupal docs is the amount of related content that has been
split into meaningless silos. For example, if I'm trying to find
information about managing users, do I look in HowTos, Tutorials,
Snippets, Understanding Drupal, Videos and Slides, Getting Started,
Contributed Modules, Troubleshooting FAQ or all of the above? The
answer, of course, is "all of the above and a whole lot more".  But if
we had some kind of tagging system, I'd only need to find one
administering user article and I'd be able to very easily see all the
rest just by clicking the "managing users" tag. It wouldn't matter
whether it was a contributed module, snippet, video, tutorial, how to,
troubleshooting and that's great because when I'm looking for
something I totally do not care in the least whether somebody else
considers it a howto, module, tutorial or tomato. As long as it
relates to my problem, that's what I want to see!

Lee Hunter
Technical Editor

On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Mike Parisi <mgparisi at rochester.rr.com> wrote:

> The problem with this PHP.org is that some comments are incorrect and have
> to be corrected, no one has permissions to do this so the comments become
> replies after replies after replies.  Maybe we should just give everyone
> permission to write and edit comments to the documentation.  Even give them
> the ability to edit other peoples comments.  I know there is some
> restriction to the API that prevents this so maybe we should just link each
> API and Document to an open WIKI page.