On Tue, 29 Nov 2011 09:23:05 +0000 (GMT) Federico Razzoli <federico_raz@yahoo.it> wrote: Federico> Federico> --- Lun 28/11/11, Peter Lavin <peter@softcoded.com> ha Federico> scritto: Peter> In defence of stubs, I don't think the 'MySQL User Guide' was Peter> very well promoted--it's hard to find, not immediately clear Peter> that contributions are welcome Federico> I agree. I use MySQL and its site since 2001 I Federico> think, and never knew of that "user guide", or suspected that Federico> contributes on any part of the wiki are welcome. Federico> Federico> But, I think that also AskMonty KB doesn't make it Federico> "immediatly clear": Federico> Federico> * In the home page and in the sidebar, I can see no link like Federico> "How to contribute" ("about AM KB" is not in evidence, and Federico> it's not clear it's written for contributors) I think a separate "How to Contribute to the KB" article is a good idea. I'll split the how-to parts of the about page out into a separate article (and feature it on the KB home page). Federico> * Categories don't have an "add page" link, nor articles have Federico> "edit" button visible to anyone (they could be disabled for Federico> non-registered users) Yes, they are disabled for non-logged-in users. We made the decision a while back that we didn't want to allow completely anonymous editing. The "Ask a question here" button is active for all users (logged in or not), but now that I think about it, the "Ask a question" button only appears on category pages and it should probably appear on all pages. Federico> Also, MySQL docs seem to strictly follow some (good) Federico> guidelines. AM KB doesn't: pages are written with different Federico> styles, some categories seem to be duplicated, and many Federico> articles are not listed in some related categories. A lack of Federico> guidelines does not encourage people who want to contrib with Federico> quality content. Yes. This is one of the issues with having many contributors. When I edit a new article contributed by someone else I generally limit myself to correcting spelling and grammar errors. I occasionally do a more thorough rewrite, but doing so takes time (which I may or may not have that week). I agree that there needs to be some category housekeeping done. This is an ongoing thing, and will need to be done periodically as the KB grows. Federico> I think that this is a problem for translations, too. I'm Federico> trying to write quality translations into italian, but I'm Federico> following my own style. What will happen when more italian Federico> users will add their own contributes? All italian translation Federico> projects I know have public guidelines, and lack of Federico> rules/help may lead to bad translations, in my opinion. We could create a style guide for the KB, or even a brief list of guidelines, or "documentation best practices". Does anyone know how useful such things have been in other projects? Thanks. -- Daniel Bartholomew MariaDB - http://mariadb.org Monty Program - http://montyprogram.com AskMonty Knowledgebase - http://kb.askmonty.org