On 04/07/2009, at 5:21 AM, randomcoder1 wrote:
Guess what , I'm in IT for several years now also , and I like writing docs , no matter if it's a documenting my own code or documenting the functionality that I'm implementing , keeping an agenda of what I did and what I still have to do. It's called getting organized. If I don't do this it's going to get out of control sooner or later. I like to write docs because I am sure that after 6 months from now if I look at my stuff it would make no difference if it was foreign code or my own code. So maybe your question should be "Ever met a very good developer who likes writing doc?" The answer I suspect is in the affirmative.
Good for you, but that's not really what we're talking about.
and a lot of the docs have never been read by a developer. That being said, using FlaggedRevs we might be able to deliver more solid docs on MW.org by flagging docs at like two levels. One could be like a basic "has been looked over for glaring errors and basic readability" and a second could be "has been thoroughly reviewed and is considered the doc on the given subject."
Perhaps we could start by getting developers to thoroughly review documentation?
With no way of planning that review, nor of co-ordinating with other developers to make sure everything's been at least somewhat looked at, there's no point in doing so.
You're proposing a technical solution to a people problem. The problem is not that the site can't display the fact that a developer vouches for the quality of documentation. The problem is that there are no processes for getting developers to review documentation and vouch for it.
To further expand on my original statements, I'm not suggesting the developers are the only ones with in-depth knowledge of how Mediawiki works. There are certainly other members of the community we can trust to handle this task as well. I'm looking at this primarily as tools to aid in fixing a problem. Of course without work on part of document writers/reviewers, this won't go anywhere.
Giving some indication of what's been checked and is authoritative and what isn't is generally a good idea. I don't document much on MediaWiki.org, but I sure don't mind checking over existing documentation.
-- Andrew Garrett Contract Developer, Wikimedia Foundation agarrett@wikimedia.org http://werdn.us