Re: [pygame] Using reStructuredText for document sources

[David Burton <ncdave4life@xxxxxxxxx>]

No, it would take no work at all.  Wikis on non-political/non-controversial topics like this are pretty much self-maintaining, and need little or no moderation.  If someone puts up spam/stupid/wrong content, then someone (anyone!) else fixes it.

 

Of course it would get spam, just like the "comments" feature of the current documentation gets spam, and probably just about as frequently.  But it wouldn't last long, because as soon as any real pygame user sees it, he'll revert it.  (In contrast, some of the spam in the current documentation has been there for years.)

 

It would be near zero effort/upkeep for folks like you and Lenard.

 

I think that the wiki software does require that there be designated admins, but for the pygame documentation wiki they won't really have much of anything to do.  You could just designate the active members of the current mailing list as admins, and be done with it.

 

The Wiki model works great for this sort of thing.  Where it breaks down is on controversial topics, where too many people have passionate interest in propagandizing for their point of view.

 

Greg's suggestion is a good one.  We could have a wiki alongside the non-wiki documentation, and just see what happens.  Start out the wiki content with a copy of the regular documentation (or start with nothing at all, and I'll fill it in by posting the current documentation as the initial wiki content).

 

My prediction is that the pygame wiki will, before long, become the de facto main documentation, because it will be the most complete and up-to-date, and whatever other documentation we have will fall into disuse.  But if I'm wrong, then nothing is lost.

 

As for downloadability, I think that it is possible to export wiki content as downloadable HTML documentation, but I've never done it:
http://code.google.com/p/google-code-wiki-to-html/

 

Dave

 

 

 

On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 7:18 PM, jug <jug@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

To use a wiki could be better than the current solution, but you'd need to moderate it, remove spam/stupid and/or wrong content/etc. -> work, no one has time for.

Regards,
Julian

 

 

On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 8:09 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

David Burton wrote:

I think just putting up a wiki with the documentation would be much better.

-1. Wikis are all very well, but I don't believe they are an
acceptable substitute for carefully written, well-organised
and downloadable documents.

A wiki in *addition* to the downloadable docs is fine, but
not instead of.

--
Greg