[Python-Dev] Moving the developer docs? (original) (raw)

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Thu Sep 23 17:58:50 CEST 2010

On Thu, 23 Sep 2010 07:56:19 -0700, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 7:47 AM, <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote: > This impression comes along with the authority of potential authors. > > If only the release manager can write a document, it is very official. > If any committer can write, but nobody else, it feels less officical. > If anybody could modify the document, it's even less official. > > Since anybody can write to the Python wiki, it feels not very official. > It's the same reason why people often trust Wikipedia less than a > printed encyclopedia.

I want to believe your theory (since I also have a feeling that some wiki pages feel less trustworthy than others) but my own use of Wikipedia makes me skeptical that this is all there is -- on many pages on important topics you can clearly tell that a lot of effort went into the article, and then I trust it more. On other places you can tell that almost nobody cared. But I never look at the names of the authors.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. The Python wiki pages mostly feel like nobody cares. At least that's the case for the ones I've stumbled across. And I'd include my own contributions in that (the email-sig wiki), because I was using them as a work area and have not updated them in some time, since development is now in a code repository.

If we can recruit a bunch of somebodies who do care, then the wiki would be much more useful. But I still don't want to edit the dev docs there, if I have a choice :) There's a reason I stopped updating the wiki as soon as I moved to a code repository.

-- R. David Murray www.bitdance.com

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