Forum OpenACS Development: Response to How about an OpenACS wiki?

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Posted by defunct defunct on
For my tuppence worth, I *really* dislike wiki s. Its not a particularly rational or scientific assessment, I've just found them clumsy in the past. I'm also puzzled by the amount of 'evangelical' support for wiki... unless I'm missing something its not exactly that impressive... (?)

However, reagrdless of my opinions on wiki (which are irrelevant) there is a more fundemntal point, which I think Lars, Don and Ben were alluding to.

As with most companies, I'd be pretty suspicious of any that didn't use their own products (Remedy, by way of an amusing example). Whether or not wiki is good is kind of, neither here nor there... if we want something similar, then it makes far more sense to produce an OpenACS pacakge. Not only does this self-promote the platform, but it also allows us the opportunity to compensate for some of the shortcomings typically found in a wiki.

I'd also like to address Ben Koots comments. I think he's on to somehting there. I feel there is a space for some kind of organisation of knowledge and experience, but possibly not in as complex fashion as described. Your suggestion Ben, (forgive me for saying so) sounds a little bit of an admin nightmare. Perhaps a simpler organisation?

Also, I am very keen on finding out how newbies can be better helped and supported, but I think that the suggestions here are a little one sided. Not everything a development community does is for the benefit of freshmeat. A lot of what is being suggested here hints of 'more work for the non-newbies, less to do for the newbies'. I know I'll get flamed for that, but I think people are forgetting that it takes time, effort and therefore money for people to spend time helping newbies etc..

If I can use the Acceptance Testing effort as an example (don't I always), Everyone gets to benefit from the effort put in, the volunteers who helped test are essentially feeding back quality code unto the community... a good thing.... but we've ended up with the same core of people doing 90% of the work..

I'd be very interested in helping you out Ben and offering what assistance I can, however we need to think about balance.

Oh, and finally... are we all convinced the current bboards we have are insufficient?

I think someone in this thread said that newbies get answers from the community they can't understand or are inappropriate or have been asked before. Perhaps thats true, although I can't say I've seen that. This particular community is *really* active, and most people here seem more than happy to answer newbie questions etc...

Its more often the case that newbies original posting are next to useless. How many times does someone post up a 'I  installed it and it doesn't work.. help!'? It pretty difficult to answer that kind of question, and people are reluctant to because it commits them to a series of emails and so forth to even get to the problem in the first place.

Is the answer perhaps a more structured question submission form? Perhaps something that required a minimum amount of information for questions to be answered? (machine, OS, log file extract etc)

Simon