Weblog entry #30 for Steve
See all weblog entries made by Steve.
Is it worth me updating and recycling older articles here?
Pros:
- Now that Sarge has been released backports are not required.
- In many topics I know more now than when I first covered them.
Cons:
- Repetition for regular site readers.
- Will make site searches less efficient.
For example we've previously discussed using mailman - but not for Sarge with Exim4 - which is significantly different.
Thoughts appreciated ..
Comments on this Entry
But this would also call for somethink like a edit this article link...so it's like a wiki...
--
browse ManPages online!
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
[ Send Message | View Steve's Scratchpad | View Weblogs ]
There already is an "edit article" link for me, as site admin ;)
I like the idea of adding updates to older articles but there isn't anything in place for bumping older articles to the front page right now.
So at the moment that would mean spending a time updating them, and then having them be "hidden" - Whilst that's not a bad thing it does mean I wouldn't have the chance to write anything new for a considerable time.
I guess there's nothing stopping me from changing things so that older articles can be front-paged but that might get a little bit confusing ..
I think realistically the options are:
- Do nothing.
- Post newer articles to the front page.
- Add comments / updates to the older articles.
One concern of the latter approach might be that the comments would then be out of sync with the articles, and that could cause confusion unless I deleted them - which isn't something I want to start doing ..
Steve
--
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
I agree to the fact that the most accurate form of debian-administration.org should not be a multi-user weblog, but a wiki.
I am also aware that Steve tried this back in June if I remember, and that it did not catch on for the (short) time that it was online.
So, I don't know. In my view, a weblog is for an article for which the date is important. On the opposite, wikis are more hierarchical, using namespaces, and adapted to documentation. Often, a comment would be better as a correction of the article.
Anyway the website has constantly been a good ressource for me, so I would only have a problem if it was to close, which hopefully is not the case. Any form would be okay.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
[ Send Message | View Steve's Scratchpad | View Weblogs ]
Wikis are good if you have the right audience, and enough people making changes. In the month or two that the wiki was here it wasn't used much at all.
I think more people were interested in writing their own "user" page than adding/updating "real" content. I felt bad to take it down, but I think that it was failing to work.
Now maybe that is my fault and I didn't leave it running long enough - but at the time it was a pretty depressing experiment. Perhaps in the future when there are more visitors here things would be different?
I'm certain that if the wiki were to return it wouldn't work out any better at the moment. I could liken that to the way that we have a few thousand regular readers but only a handful of regular writers ..
At the time the interesting ideas I had were:
- A wiki
- A mailing list
- A forum.
I have a dislike of forums, and forums.debian.net seems like the place to go anyway. Mailing lists are covered in excess already at lists.debian.org. (Although I would like to see something more SysAdminy - the closest official list is debian-isp, which is frequently the source of basic sysadmin questions ..) In the end the wiki idea won out, and then .. err .. failed to win out!
But having said that I have no immediate plans to close. Several times I've felt that I've reached the limit of the topics that I can personally cover. But usually after a day or two I realise I can add something else.
(You can probably spot which days I have writers block/apathy by seeing which week-days don't get any updates!)
My hope is that a number of other users will start contributing things regularly by the time I burn out completely - if that happens then I see no problem with continuing indefinitely.
Steve
--
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
It's nice to be able to link forward and backward to different editions of an article, but I don't know how that's best achieved. Wikis are good for drafting ideas, and this site is good a collecting suggestions to an idea, the hard part is pulling an artcile and it's feedback (however collected) into a nice complete "how-to".
Perhaps some of the articles could be turned into more formal documentation?
It's late and I'm falling asleep, but I think there is very good stuff here, and I'd like to see both more of it and it get the widest possible audience.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
For example, you could apply the tags Woody and Exim to an article, or Sarge and Postfix. Perhaps a generic MailServer tag would be good too.
If these similar articles (particularly the newer ones) were prominently linked to, half of your problem would be gone.
The second half of the problem is that user submitted comment do improve an existing article. A good "problem" :) For this you could version each article, but still allowing previous versions of the article to be available for viewing. The comments for the each article would apply to that version of the article.
The complicated problem with this is that this makes the website a documentation factory. Users comments get slurped into the next version of the article with no attribution as to who suggested which improvement. I don't think people want to help build a documentation website, I think they want to comment on articles and for their comment to remain. You'll scare people with a documentation factory.
To work around this, maybe you could mark a comment as being accepted for a future amendment to the article.
Perhaps for now, just tagging would be the best option.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
[ Send Message | View Steve's Scratchpad | View Weblogs ]
Thanks for those interesting comments. I like the idea of "tagging".
Whilst I think that the idea of tagging things specifically "mailserver" is just adding complication I think the idea of adding "woody", "sarge", "etch" as tags would be very useful - and these could easily be combined into the search page to help people find relevent pieces.
You're correct in worrying about the lack of attribution for updates. Something I'd been thinking about a little. I think that the best plan is to rework a few articles on "popular" subjects, and just tag the rest.
Steve
--
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]