[mythtv-users] Re:MythTV Help Website

[J. Donavan Stanley]

Maarten van den Berg wrote:

>On Thursday 15 April 2004 06:56, Dan Conti wrote:
>
>  
>
>Precisely!  And this fact is the single, strongest reason to deploy a wiki !!
>When the answers are there for everyone to find, the flood of messages on this 
>high-volume list will drop significantly. Everybody will be happy.
>  
>
Semi OT:  I've never seen a wiki that was worth a crap.  Care to share a 
couple links?


>And, you gotta appreciate the irony in the answer to the OP.  ;-)
>  
>
Searching the mailing list archives or using google for an OSS project 
should be considered the equivalent of reading the help file of a 
windows app.  That's just how things work.  The folks that come here 
asking questions that are easily answerable are the same folks that call 
tech support before reading the help files. 

The only real irony is that the OP was offering yet another information 
source to the project when he himself had not availed himself of the the 
existing ones.



>>But the truth is that people dont read the documentation. 80% of the
>>developer posts on this list end up being hyperlinks to places in the docs
>>where obvious questions are answered. And there are limits to how extensive
>>the documentation can be; just keeping it to a limited set of distributions
>>is a task in and of itself, since there are a significant number of
>>dependencies for this project. Trying to keep on top of all the
>>distributions and all the variations between versions would be a nightmare.
>>    
>>
>
>Sure thing. But, all the more reason for a wiki.
>  
>

Again, I'd have to see a wiki that works but every one I've seen is full 
of holes, wrong information and useless info that it's impossible to 
find anything useful.  The exception to that has been the various 
"definition" sites that have a very focused scopes.


>Now, back to this. I feel that there is a VERY big difference between 
>requiring sgml patches, or having a low-threshold wiki. Let's say I wanted to 
>correct or annotate 1 sentence in the docs. Send patches ? Yeah, very likely. 
>No, just like everybody else, I just assume that it being corrected on the ML 
>is enough, and that maybe even someone already compiles a faq out of ML 
>answers. (when you are new you have no way to know how it currently is done)   
>  
>
Now we've switched gears here... A little bit ago folks were talking 
about adding large amounts of documentation not correcting things here 
and there.


>Just like with coding, people are reluctant to be made fun of for making 
>mistakes, be it typos, awkward sentences, misinformation.  A wiki is a good 
>way to lower the threshold people have to step over to contribute.
>  
>
That makes little sense to me.  If you submit a patch to the docs a 
couple of people will bother to apply, read it  and give feedback.  If 
it's on a Wiki it's out there for everyone to see and ridicule.


>As coders, you just can't imagine how big a hurdle it is for 'ordinary people'
>to hear that they have to learn, for example, XML before they can join in.
>  
>

You do have a point.


>The way it works for me -and a lot of others, I presume- is like this:
>First, you have tons of questions (you're a newbie!) and can't offer anything 
>back as you're struggling yourself. Then, having found out some things, you 
>think "may be better to lurk on the ML a couple of weeks first" to get 
>yourself an idea of how things are done in this project. You don't yet feel 
>"ready" to contribute, as you think you may not know enough yet. But then, 
>after a while, you progress, and you may get interested in other projects. 
>You tend to forget the problems you struggled with, once you overcome them.
>  
>

But the million dollar question is:  "Did you need to struggle with that 
problem?"  i.e. if you had: Read all the docs, searched the mailing list 
& used google would you have found the answer in a reasonable amount of 
time?

Personally, I think what Myth needs more than a Wiki is a FAQ and even 
that could be rolled into the howto I think.  I'm not saying a wiki is a 
horrible idea, I just question the usefulness of adding another 
information source when the existing ones aren't being used properly.