Re: Debian is testing Discourse
On Thu 23 Apr 2020 at 08:29:46 (+0200), deloptes wrote:
> David Wright wrote:
>
> > 1. Going from thinking to knowing. Even assuming they're well-informed,
> > it may be worth checking with other people running different systems
> > about what's wrong, and what the new text should say.
> >
> > 2. Pages often need more than just piecemeal corrections: they may
> > need someone with a sense of ownership to restructure them, or even
> > to coordinate a rewrite when they lose focus.
>
> totally agree with you. You see what happens to wikipedia. (I mean wikipedia
> can not be trusted. it was prooven that people falsify information or
> impose censorship).
It depends what sort of pages you're reading. I think it's fairly
obvious that there are going to be contentious topics that attract
those problems, and in some cases investigators have even tracked
the source of edits via IP addresses and suchlike. But that tends
not to be the sort of information I'm looking for on wikipedia.
> Best would be to have ownership and the community to decide what needs to be
> there, after which the owner of the document can edit.
On Thu 23 Apr 2020 at 14:56:36 (+0300), Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> The best thing about a wiki is that anyone can edit it[1]. Having to
> check with others first would, in my opinion, just hinder contributions.
> [1] Unfortunately this can also mean that nobody is actually editing it.
I haven't said that they can't, but only that they can choose, on the
basis of their own knowledge, whether to edit the page directly or
else to suggest changes in the discussion area.
And I totally agree with Jonathan Dowland that the worst decision was
separating the discussion area from the page. I also think that the
page's History should be there too, not just in a time-sorted sidebar
of miscellaneous individual changes made across the entire Debian wiki
(and which evaporate after a few days or weeks).
> > 2. Pages often need more than just piecemeal corrections: they may
> > need someone with a sense of ownership to restructure them, or even
> > to coordinate a rewrite when they lose focus.
>
> This looks very much like "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"[2] models.
>
> In my opinion a wiki is much better suited for the bazaar model, the
> cathedral model you seem to be advocating is better suited for more
> formal documents (Debian Policy, Installation Guide, Release Notes,
> etc.).
I'm not advocating the Cathedral model at all: I deliberately wrote
"sense of ownership¹" and not "ownership". IOW it helps if there people
who care not only about the raw information in the wiki, but how it's
expressed and presentation.
Clean-up can vary from increasing clarity by removing unintentional
ambiguities and improving unidiomatic phrases (many contributors are
not writing in their mother tongues), to regrouping related information,
prioritising the order in which it's presented, inserting headings,
and so on.
> Reminder: development of all Debian manuals is open, anyone is free to
> report bugs and/or provide suggestions, preferably as patches.
*These* are, rightly, the Cathedral.
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
¹ a sense of ownership is shown by somebody who walks their street
after school turns out, picking up the litter, and then does the
same whenever they visit their favourite beauty spot.
Cheers,
David.
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