Improving the Wiki

[Bruno Medeiros]

Brad Roberts wrote:
> 
> The recent look/feel updates to wiki4d are good, in general change spurrs 
> activity. :)
> 
> As a step to facilitate even more activity, I just spent an hour or so 
> going through a good portion of the contents of this wiki and created a 
> page to list stale content:
> 
>      http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?StalePages
> 
> In the process, I found this page, which is also a good place to 
> concentrate some energy:
> 
>      http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?HelpDProgress
> 
> Additionally, I added a reference to the StalePages page on this 
> HelpDProgress page.
> 
> I'll be adding to the list of staleness as well as addressing some of the 
> pages that I feel suited to tackle, but a group effort is called for.
> 
> Later,
> Brad

Good idea. "Less is More" is especially true here, as removing stale 
information adds value to the wiki.

In fact, it would be interesting to call for a collaborative work to 
clean some (or many) of the wiki parts. A more radical approach, but one 
which I would support, would be to Garbage Collect the whole thing. 
(meaning to blank all entries, and then re-enter (or re-edit) those who 
are still found to be significant). Perhaps a bit too radical?

In any case, I would like to help clean up some of the parts related to 
language peeves and design issues.
The [DONE] entries should be removed (except perhaps any very recent ones).
Also, the introduction of the Bugzilla makes it redundant for the wiki 
to report on issues that are merely bugs.

Thinking even further, the wiki could be used as a repository for 
summaries of the current "discussion state" of design 
features/peeves/issues. A standardized method and/or page for doing so 
would even be better. For instance a wiki page lists the common existing 
design issues, and for each one of those, another wiki entry exists 
listing a summary/abstract, background(optional), issue description, 
points and threads argued, community feedback (both negative and 
positive). Even if Walter doesn't pay attention to it (which is 
expected) it helps a bit to the community to know what is the current 
status, and the opinion of the rest of the community members.

I know thar there very standardized and very formalized processes for 
languages changes in some other languages, and someone with knowledge of 
these (I haven't) could contribute some good well-based ideas. We don't 
need nor should have anything that complicated though, just something 
simple, which is useful enough already.

Opinions, comments, sugestions on what I said, please.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D