Henne Vogelsang wrote:
Hi, The problem we face at the moment is that there are not enough active members in any of the "teams".
good point. but this should lead you to the question why? and what can we do to enhance things. shouting will not :-) a beginning of answer is: * cut the tasks in smaller chunks. Wiki is good for that. may be we could try to find some "page mainteners". people that could look at one page (or one category) and help keep them con,sustent (people, for example, identified in the discussion page) * gives rewards. the e-mail thing. I dunno if it's a good idea. but may be and such thing have to be made by somebody. somebody have to get a look at the recent pages (who don't, here :-). and when he see somebody repetidly writing a page ask him if he wants to take this in charge.
Look for instance in the support database. Martin imported a lot of articles from the old one. Its the perfect place to add small amounts of documentation. There even is a HOWTO on writing an sdb article, there is a style guide, there are lots of old articles you can learn from. So its really easy to add SDB articles.
honestly I question why anybody should worry about SBD. SDB was a very good thing in others times, but I think it's not so consistent with the wikiway. it's too unusefully strict, this frame, in my advice, get the people out of it. wiki is a freestyle system and this is good. Now we are close to 10.1 and im
sure there are some rough edges in it that need explenation. Did anyone write any article about something in 10.1 yet? No.
how could we write things about something that change all the time???
Or another case. The Download page. Everybody knows that we will release 10.1 tomorrow. Everybody can see that the Download pages is not up to it yet. Its needs some work to reflect the new media layout, maybe a new template or things like that. Is it hard to do? No. Is anyone doing it? No.
a bullet in your foot :-) we don't know how 10.1 will be setup, how could we explain this? did you not have at hand a new template?
Or the best example ever. The Taks page. Did anyone do anything from the task page yet? No. Yesterday the first task got done and that page is there since a month. Its even linked from menu. So its not very hard to find (1 click!).
it's new and not that well defined. task for who, wish list?
What im trying to say is that we are short on active members. We are not short on leadership,
yes, we are. too many things have bneen discussed, seamingly solved and no see. The leader is the one that say:do. as long as nobody say we must go in this direction, nobody will go. why take days of work if this work is to be refused?
And just a small sidenote:
In fact there is already a strong leadership in most of the areas
I'm a leader of the french wiki, because I can say to others "I'm the french wiki sysop". I can prove it by changing pages others can't change. I was asked to by Novell, and If ever Novell said I'm completely wrong in some circomstances and I don't like it, I will resign. (but I try not to get in such a cicumstance). don't think this have no importance. I'm very cautious when I make changes, I play an "opensuse" forum on Alionet http://www.alionet.org/index.php?showforum=88 where I ask for users opinion (and the new front page layout I used was very well appreciated - but the fact I asked was appreciated also). I follow the recent page and contact the authors. I hope all this will step by step make people come to us. Novell employees can do this, volunteers can't without a minimum official support.
project. So youre already proved wrong in when you object that "leaders manifesting themselves naturally" because they already have...
so why can't Novell (the benevolent dictator :-) make this official. take one, ask him if he wants to be the "documentation" page maintener and let him do his work (even blocking the page if he thinks it's usefull)... I don't care what the page is, I can still use the discussion page as a whish list :-) jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://dodin.org/galerie_photo_web/expo/index.html http://lucien.dodin.net http://fr.susewiki.org/index.php?title=Gérer_ses_photos