Large User-Maintained Documentation? 22
SysKoll asks: "I am working for a company that has release several open source contributions. Our flagship product, often updated, has thousands of pages of documentation that are constantly revised to stay relevant. Right now, users who find a doc defect send an email, and the doc is updated both on the web site and in the updates, but it can take weeks. I am trying to convince my upper management that the way
to go is to turn the doc web site into a wiki-style community site, where registered users can annotate pages directly between official revisions. Does anyone know a large set of web-published documentation that is annotated using this kind of user feedback?"
PHP? (Score:1, Informative)
PHP.net (Score:4, Informative)
Re:PHP.net (Score:2)
PHP.NET (Score:3, Informative)
Go [php.net] explore it a while. Especially look at the functions individually [php.net]. I even think it's overall the best documentation site I've seen yet.
Re:PHP.NET (Score:3, Insightful)
The offical documentation at PHP.net is great. Slightly sparse in places but on the whole pretty usable.
I learnt PHP from those pages, and those pages alone.
_However_ the user-contributed feedback was _abyssmal_. It was contributed by people who knew just enough to get things done in one clumsy way, and that's why after hours of trying they thought it would be useful to share their experience and their results.
The problem is, it's usually a clumsy way, and only useful to ot
Re:PHP.NET (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:PHP.NET (Score:1)
A good system might be the scoring system that Allakhazam uses. Initially, your comments on things are rated at a score of 2.00, and anyone who has an account can mod your comment up/down (1.00 is the lowest score, 5.00 is the highest, default filter is to hide comments under 1.50). As you get more and more posts rated at higher levels, your initial
Re:PHP.NET (Score:1)
The thing is sometimes that the clumsy hacks are sometimes _useful_ to know. I wasn't being fair above. When there's a bug in PHP that needs to be coded around, proper respect to the guy that first posts the workaround. However, within weeks or mon
Re:Welcome to GNU GVideo GProfessor! (Score:2)
Re:Welcome to GNU GVideo GProfessor! (Score:2)
kudos for not using trhe obvious pun. Unless you didn't see it. In that case, your going to be hunted done by the Punsiter.
That was bad, I should come up with something GNU...
bork bork
Most of them don't even RTFM (Score:4, Funny)
Lots of places do this... (Score:2)
-Adam
TikiWiki CMS/Groupware (Score:3, Interesting)
Disclaimer: Yes, I'm one of the developers and am trolling for new users. You can't blame a guy for trying, right?
Stay Away From Wiki (Score:3, Interesting)
A Wiki is just like a giant bathroom wall. Tons of information, and completely no organization or flow. There is no editor marking which is good and which is bad.
If you do go to a Wiki, you'll need someone there to continually categorize everything and organize it. Without a content manager, the Wiki becomes useless very quickly. Even though there might be tons of good information in there, no one will know how to find it.
Re:Stay Away From Wiki (Score:3, Insightful)
Regardless, no matter what system you go with, you have to have a gatekeeper / editing team to periodically seperate the wheat from the chaff, to consolidate 3 pages of notes down into a easly dige
Barriers are a Good Thing (Score:3, Insightful)
It should be hard to mess up documentation, just as hard as it is to mess up code.
The Zope Book is user commentable (Score:1)
product called "TalkBack" developed by one of the Zope developers.
It worked moderately well, I think. Fewer problems than the PHP
community had, I think, probably because the Zope community is
smaller and so you get fewer of the clumsy-hack notes. I think if
you take the tack of *authorizing* people to comment, then you can
avoid that problem to a considerable extent. Also, if you can
maintain the schedule of incorporating updates within two or
gallery (Score:2)
IN general, wikis are good, but you need somebody in charge of checking revision constantly and maintaining style consistency across pages. Users tend to make a mess of the wiki site.
Mysql.com (Score:1, Informative)
But moderation is the key. You need a hand at the contr