How, precisely, can we improve?

[Moritz Angermann]

That is an interesting way to interact with the wiki, I had
never thought about using it that way!

So what you are proposing is a version controlled text based
documentation system, precisely you can download the wiki and
use your own cli/editor finding/indexing tools on it?

This would of course be covered by almost any of the static
side generation tools that work off of git I assume.

I’m still uncertain how to accommodate Richards dynamic features
into this? And I believe he’s not the only one who relies on them?

Regarding the stale wiki page issue, scanning the history for
files could potentially provide a list of “old” items, and
eventually one could just delete them from master (automatically?)


> On Sep 29, 2016, at 12:37 PM, Christopher Allen <cma at bitemyapp.com> wrote:
> 
> Makes sense, no problem!
> 
> I think my main personal complaints with docs have been:
> 
> Poor discoverability — neither wikis nor search solve this, I want a
> dir listing.
> 
> Slow search — almost every wiki has slow search. bouncing out to
> google is annoying. just let me grep.
> 
> Broken links — this is particularly annoying as unis like to shut down
> student accounts hosting papers. I had to do some archaeology on an
> obscure Chinese FTP server to find some of Don Stewart's papers and
> slides recently.
> 
> I believe there can be a convincing solution to all of this and more.
> 
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 11:33 PM, Moritz Angermann
> <moritz at lichtzwerge.de> wrote:
>> Chris,
>> 
>> I’m all in favor of a better system! My only intention was to point
>> to a solution that might help with the current system, right now.
>> 
>> I’ve come to use that feature quite frequently even outside of this
>> specific use case, as many of the results are often full of
>> interesting yet stale information.
>> 
>> Anyhow, I don’t want to obligate anyone to do anything, and if this
>> was perceived that way, I’m truly sorry.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Moritz
>> 
>>> On Sep 29, 2016, at 12:24 PM, Christopher Allen <cma at bitemyapp.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Why not just do the better thing to begin with rather than obligating
>>> people to think to use this feature? Most, even those who know it's an
>>> option, aren't going to think to do this in the heat of trying to
>>> track down an answer to something.
>>> 
>>> On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 11:08 PM, Moritz Angermann
>>> <moritz at lichtzwerge.de> wrote:
>>>> Just a quick note: Google provides the “Date range” filter found under
>>>> search options. This allows to narrow down the date range.
>>>> 
>>>>> On Sep 29, 2016, at 11:55 AM, Bardur Arantsson <spam at scientician.net> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 2016-09-29 04:43, Richard Eisenberg wrote:
>>>>>> Here's a pre-proposal (which could be formalized into a proper proposal)
>>>>>> to address the wiki discussion:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> - Configure the wiki to display the date of last edit prominently.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> - If the date of last edit is sufficiently long ago (1 year?) loudly
>>>>>> warn the reader that the content may be out-of-date.
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> I see at least one major issue with this: Search engines don't care if
>>>>> you write "THIS MAY BE OUT OF DATE" on the page. It's a perennial
>>>>> problem that search engines keep linking out of date material just
>>>>> because such material tends to be linked more (simply because of age).
>>>>> 
>>>>> There are few tings as infuriating as going through a bunch of search
>>>>> results and getting pages from 10 years ago.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Regards,
>>>>> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> ghc-devs mailing list
>>>>> ghc-devs at haskell.org
>>>>> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
>>>> 
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>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Chris Allen
>>> Currently working on http://haskellbook.com
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Chris Allen
> Currently working on http://haskellbook.com