List of technical documentation: is it a useful page? What should be here? What should not?

Michael Shiloh michael at openmoko.org
Wed Aug 27 08:37:59 CEST 2008



Minh Ha Duong wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>   I made a mistake and replied to you only, not to the list. You did the 
> same ?
> 
> Minh
> --
> Le mardi 26 août 2008, vous avez écrit :
>> haduong at centre-cired.fr wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>>  I kindly disagree with the big concern as a matter of principle.
>>>
>>>  Lists, categories and navigation templates in article series (like the
>>> "Distribution" box) are all ways of organizing information. Risk of
>>> confusion and being out of sync exists, but we should have mucho
>>> redundancy and keep them all. Promote diversity rather than uniformity,
>>> because some users will use lists, other use categories. Other advantages
>>> and inconvenients are discussed here:
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories,_lists,_and_navigation_
>>> templates
>>>
>>> IMHO key advantages of lists is that
>>> - They can be include desired missing pages
>>> - They can be sorted in different ways than categories and formatted
>>> beautifully
>>> Admittedly this list is none of the above. But this is a wiki, and not
>>> being finished is not a reason for deletion but for rewrite.
>>>
>>>  That said, I agree that this for now the page's mission statement is so
>>> broad and fuzzy that
>>> - it is essentially the same as the index.
>>> - it has a huge "miscelanous" section.
>>> So I agree with you that this page need to be replaced by something more
>>> precise to be useful. Brenda seems to be working on it a lot, so I guess
>>> we should hear from her. For now, I will put a note at the top the page.
>>>
>>>> The only use I can see for this page is to collect links to _external_
>>>> documents, but then I would name it as such.
>>> Minh
>> Minh makes some good points, although I'm not sure I agree with them all.
>>
>> Brenda, is this something you're working on or should I go ahead and try
>> to fix up this page?
>>
>> Michael
> 
> 
> 


Brenda, what do you think?

Michael



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