Hi! On 29 Nov 2011, at 05:14, Shaun McCance wrote:
Hi all,
What are your thoughts on adding stub articles/sections to the KB? For example, adding an article for how to specify account names without actually writing the content, along with a note to whoever comes along about what the article should contain.
I think stub articles are great, but I also think we have some problems with stubs that say, Wikipedia won't have: 1. will we create and forget about stubs (I have in the past -- now we have Pending articles) 2. who moderates once stubs get created? Wikipedia has a very active community of editors. Removing spam is comparatively easy, ensuring quality is a whole other thing (I know now Daniel does a lot of this) 3. how do we drive people to create articles that are in stubs? Question #3 interests me greatly. Wikipedia is free of ads, and you see Jimmy Wales beg you at the end of every year. The KB has ads (which I prefer, to begging, fwiw) Wikipedia is free-form knowledge. The KB is focused on SQL, MySQL, MariaDB (what I would consider more niche - i.e. barrier to entry is higher)
I've seen stubs work well in other docs efforts. They're an easy way for contributors to cherry pick work. But with the "everything is always published" model of a wiki-like KB, stubs can be annoying to average readers, like a 90s-esque "under construction" banner.
Stubs can be mighty annoying when you're looking for something via search and all you find is a stub I wonder if it will also hurt our Google rankings? More stubs = less content = "spam" site. Do we know the impact stubs have on this (and we can't compare to Wikipedia, because we know that there is whitelisting of sites in their search engine -- see recent thread on "hacker news" in where they were not #1 any longer and Matt Cutts, search maestro/webspam dude at Google chimed in to help) If the benefits outweigh the potential cons, I'm all for stubs cheers, -c -- Colin Charles, http://bytebot.net/blog/ | twitter: @bytebot | skype: colincharles MariaDB: Community developed. Feature enhanced. Backward compatible. Download it at: http://www.mariadb.org/ Open MariaDB/MySQL documentation at the Knowledgebase: http://kb.askmonty.org/