[Haskell] Making Haskell more open

[Ketil Malde]

"Simon Peyton-Jones" <simonpj at microsoft.com> writes:

> * Gour suggested using a Content Management System (e.g. Drupal
> http://drupal.org/) for haskell.org's front page.

I'm not familiar with Drupal, but at least EZ publish allows users to
convert pages to PDF - could be quite useful for documentation etc.

> * There were suggestions of newsgroups and web forums. Different people
> seem to like different things.  That's ok -- maybe a good content
> management system would support a lot of things, and people could
> choose.

I'm not sure you really want to integrate all information channels
into one; you are likely to end up with the least common denominator. 

The GHC manual, the wiki, this list, and the IRC channel serve
different purposes, and those purposes are best served through
different media.  

> * Some people suggested using MediaWiki instead of MoinMoin for Hawiki.
> I have no idea about the issues here.  Maybe it's just a matter of
> taste.

Matter of taste, and ease of administration.  While my tastes go in
the MW direction, I'm also in favor of docracy -- the doers get to
decide. 

My main problem with the wiki is the form of the pages.  Many of them
(in particular the newbie pages you wanted us to work on :-) seem to
try to emulate web forums, consisting of a string of questions,
answers, elaborations of answers, more questions etc, all signed by
the contributor.

On e.g. Wikipedia, articles are neutral pieces of text, and it's very
easy to improve it in any way.  In Hawiki, I feel there is a large
degree of ownership attached to each paragraph, and it makes me a bit
wary of modifying it.  Is it okay if I rewrite the page?  Should I
keep the signatures?  So while Wikipedia feels like a commons, Hawiki
much less so, and the net result is more often than not that I just
leave it. 

> * We don't have a plausible way of annotating GHC's user manual.  One
> suggestion is a tree of Wiki pages, each linked from the corresponding
> section of the manual.

One easy way would be to simply provide a link to a corresponding wiki
page - as the wiki will let you create the page if it doesn't exist
already. 

It would be nice to have some way of displaying whether there is any
actual wiki content, of course, and perhaps one would like to have
different kinds of associated materials (Q&A, examples, theoretical
discourse, etc).

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants