wiki discussion (was: wiki try at gnomesupport.org)

[Christian Stimming]

Jon Lapham schrieb:
> Christian Stimming wrote:
>>
>> http://gnomesupport.org/wiki/index.php/GnuCash
> 
> I'm a bit conflicted over whether I like the idea of a wiki or not.  On 
> one hand, it is great in that people can easily contribute.  On the 
> other hand, it is Yet Another Place for Documentation.
> 
> I guess I can use the wiki as a place to harvest information to put in 
> the documentation, kind of like what I do now with the user- mailing 
> list archives, the devel- ML archives, the v1.6 docs, IRC, external 
> HOWTOs, etc, etc, ....

Maybe we should make it very clear what the purpose of a gnucash wiki 
page is. Maybe this should even be written in the beginning of that page.

In my opinion (and over the last months with the German wiki page 
linuxwiki.de/GnuCash) the wiki is the place for "raw information 
collection". It's not *discussion* since this is what mailing lists are 
for, and it is not a "uber-sophisticated user documentation" since 
that's what gnucash-docs is for. But IMHO it is the place where all the 
FAQs and all the quickly-asked-and-answered issues should be 
*collected*. If they turn out to be interesting to the general public, 
they should be included in gnucash-docs subsequently.

But the whole point of a wiki is to reduce the "turnaround time" between 
a question asked and the answer *posted to a public place" to zero. I 
see this as one way to ensure the resulting answer is understandable for 
the target audience.

> Maybe my question to you (Christain) is this:  When and why should 
> people use the wiki over simply using the GnuCash documentation?

As I said: "This wiki page exists to collect problems and answers around 
the gnucash software."

> Oh, and I certainly recognize the fact that the current documentation 
> seems rather immutable to normal users.  Maybe we should come up with a 
> way to change that.  One way I have been trying to change that is by 
> being responsive to users in terms of documenting things, as they ask it.

Yes, and that's very good. However, even if, say, my specific user 
question gets answered by you and you even include the answer in the 
gnucash-docs, I will probably not update my gnucash-docs installation 
for weeks to come. So I will not see the outcome of our discussion any 
time soon. On the contrary I would immediately see the outcome of a FAQ 
in a wiki, and if the phrasing sounds still unclear to me, I could 
easily try to improve it myself.

Just to give an additional impression about what kind of information 
gets collected in a wiki: In the German wiki a lot of quickly-answered 
issues were included that I didn't even consider "documentation-worthy". 
We now have
- direct links to external rpms
- links to external explanation of double-entry book keeping
- short explanation of double-entry book keeping
- HBCI-specific FAQ
- long instructions about installation from source code with HBCI
- collection of HBCI-specific enhancement requests

The enhancement requests could go into bugzilla, but OTOH HBCI concerns 
only a very particular user group. Same thing for everything else. The 
explanation could go into gnucash-docs, but currently nobody is working 
on the German docs translation. So as soon as somebody starts, they will 
probably include those parts collected in the wiki.

Christian