Re: tarsnap website redesign

[Graham Percival <graham@percival-music.ca>]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 10:45:08AM +0200, Mads Sülau Jørgensen wrote:
> On 11/08/2009, at 01.27, Graham Percival wrote:
>
>>> *Twitch*.  I need to get over my irrational dislike of wikis.
>>
>> No you don't.  As a documentation guy, I have an entirely
>> *rational* dislike of wikis.  Trust me on this.  Give in to your
>> hate.  Join the Dark Side.  :)
>
> If you have a rational disliking of wiki's, please do share your reasons 
> for such a disliking, especially whatever reasons are relevant for the 
> project at hand - without using the force :)
>
> I think you might be looking at this from the eyes of a project  
> maintainer and me as a user.

As a project maintainer, a wiki encourages the attitude that
"somebody else will do it", from both developers and users.  One
of the best motivations for people to work on docs is a feeling of
ownership.  Telling X that he's responsible for section 2.3
results in much more work than just saying "hey guys, let's work
on sections 1.1 to 2.8!".

As a user, quite apart from the out-of-date-ness of most wikis,
they generally result in a collection of individual pages, rather
than maintaining a consistent documentation style and voice.  The
overall organization is generally lacking.

For the record, I've never set up a wiki; I'm speaking purely as a
doc writer/editor and reader.

Granted, none of these issues are pressing in this case, since
we're talking about a single page rather than a set of pages.
Still, wikis are generally worse than useless for small projects.
Too many people use them as a replacement for documentation.  In
some cases, they might be suitable as an addition to docs, but
even then, I'm not convinced that they actually save time for the
developers / official doc writers.


>> Why don't you encourage users to send scripts to -users or you
>> personally?
>
> I really don't care where or how such content would be contributed, but 
> if I am to contribute to it, the time I need to spend on doing just that 
> should be minimal.

Sending an email is much more minimal than editing a wiki.  I
mean, you can use your favorite text editor for emails, whereas
wikis have the pathetic web browser "text edit" box.  :)

Cheers,
- Graham