On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 11:26:40AM -0400, R P Herrold wrote: > On Wed, 30 Sep 2009, Phil Schaffner wrote: > > ... > > P.S. Also develop a thick skin. :-) This could be a proving-ground for > > technical writers in-training, and the constructive criticism can > > sometimes be a bit heavy, but it is generally well-intended. > > As one of the lead mosquito's [1], I resemble that remark (One pictures Russ bowing to the audience here.) > > Seriously, to me, I've been thinking about it the source of my > concern for the last couple of weeks, and the tension comes > down to 'core' v 'adjunct' and has a reasonably simple > resolution -- split the two, and put all non-core material in > a 'projects.centos.org' sub domain > After the last flame go round, I communicated with the head of the Arch Wiki, asking how they filtered content and so on. They kindly replied, saying that what had happened was this. First, there were three and only three people who basically redid the whole wiki. Then, they were burnt out and gave the task this this person. (The one with whom I was corresponding). I think that is part of it, one, or at most 3 (more or less like-minded) people making the decisions. To overly simplify, one esteemed member might feel that one should just put the steps for installing program X on CentOS, and once the yum install is done (or whatever little tweaks have to be made afterwards), the user should then be sent to program X's website. Someone else, equally esteemed (in both cases, having earned their esteem by merit--use of esteemed here is not sarcastic), feels that the article should then tell the newcomer what to do with their new program--perhaps because program X's website is outdated, or overly complex, or for whatever reason. So, the author of the article gets caught between two esteemed people, wondering, perhaps, if they made a mistake. Meanwhile, it makes the rest of us who view the drama, far less apt to even consider offering an article to the CentOS wiki. So, Russ' suggestion most certainly has merit, if it could stop this situation. I think section that actually tells you what to do with something after installing it will get far more traffic, but that's as may be. <further useful content snipped--if you didn't read it the first time, you're unlikely to read it now.> :) -- Scott Robbins PGP keyID EB3467D6 ( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 ) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6 Buffy: Cordelia, your mouth is open, sound is coming from it, this is never good.
