Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Feedback needed for documentation

[Dinu G. <gh...@da...>]

Jack Jansen:

> Wiki's simply don't work for me, and I think this is what Just also
> means, because every time I go to one that is about an interesting
> subject I have this feeling of being at a large table filled with
> beermats, postit-notes, scraps of paper and more. Clearly some of
> the people who left them there knew what they were talking about,
> but the complete lack of organization/indexing usually leaves me be-
> wildered.
> CVS and mailing lists are two CSCW paradigms that work for me, but
> Wiki's are somewhere in between, and I can't seem to get the hang
> of them.

Hi Jack!

You, too, confound people and technology! While CVS, email and wikis
are all different technologies, it doesn't mean the right people
don't exist to use them in a nasty way! (Hofstadter's argument adap-
ted: for each technology there is a set of ways to use it in a use-
less manner.) That disqualifies wikis no more than it does CVS or
email.

As you mention a lack of organization/indexing, I'll give one exam-
ple of a highly organized Wiki, with more than 120,000 articles,
Wikipedia:

   http://www.wikipedia.org
   http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=Python
   http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=Python&go=Go

I shall not say much more about the subject, but you can also have
dedicated bridging tools, like for coupling Wikis with CVS, so you
can work offline, too. Or take my RSS indices into CVS, which Wikis
ususally have built-in as a special page, the "RecentChanges".

Ok, for the fun of it, one more: people have built issue trackers
for wikis, like this one (clearly an example of a very organized
use of the Wiki way, isn't it? ;-)

   http://zwiki.org/IssueTracker

BTW, you can find my preliminary item collection about PyObjC do-
cumentation issues in this wiki, kindly offered by Zack. I'm not
going to work much more on it before I can have downloadable ar-
chives thereof! ;-)

   http://pyobjc.urbanape.com

Regards,

Dinu

--
Dinu C. Gherman
......................................................................
"It's difficult to make things foolproof, because fools are
so ingenious!" (Anonymous)