Community Contributed Documentation – Tamil sees some
Open source projects have a lot of documentation. Some professionally written, others community contributed. One thing that community contributed documentation has going for it is the passionate users that write localized content.
Localization of documentation is important. While we take it for granted that we all speak/read/write/understand the English language, a lot of people just starting out in non-English speaking areas might find it useful to read some localized content. Hook them based on their interests, and slowly they can be weaned off to other non-localized documentation, and might contribute to the localizing cause eventually, even.
Localization is also not easy. If you tried to localize the MySQL Documentation, its recommended you start with something smaller like the GUI tools, rather than the entire user manual. This because of its sheer size. I dare say, we have one of the best user manuals for any open source project out there. Its cogent, its concise.
Tamil (Indian) Documentation
But the point of this post, was really to encourage more community contributed documentation. Of late, we’ve had some Tamil documentation, that I myself can’t review, but I’m sure the collaborative and distributed nature of the Internet will enable us to find some Tamil reading people, who can write better, and longer descriptions about what’s there.
I’m sorry its a Word document. I didn’t want to convert it to a PDF because I have no idea if the fonts will break. For what it is worth, there is a supplied font that you might find useful, if you were reading it. Now, who wants to review it?
Blogs via Planet MySQL
If you read Planet MySQL, you’ll realize that quite a lot of the content there is high-quality MySQL related content. What you will also realize is that these are on individual user blogs, and its all fed based on topic and regex searches (thanks Arjen, for this!). But content within Planet MySQL disappears from the front of the page after 10 entries.
To fix this, there are the Planet MySQL Archives. If you notice, these are actually cached on Planet MySQL itself, so the content will be preserved if you move blog host, or somehow manage to be taken off the Internet. However, this isn’t a hundred percent solution, as not all the content on the Planet are actually “article material”.
So wouldn’t it be nice if all the article material were on the MySQL Forge Wiki? This way, we would have a community-based data store, with available information for all to draw on.
What are your thoughts? Is publishing on the wiki too difficult? I’m interested in hearing your comments (or even better, tell me what your blog posting workflow is like). colin AT mysql dot com works too.
I wouldn’t want to publish on the wiki. I already spend a lot of time thinking about and writing my articles; making them available elsewhere is what RSS is for.
If it’s archived somewhere automatically, I wouldn’t mind, as long as it’s always clear where the content originated. Syndication shouldn’t mean losing my control over the fact that I’m the author and my website is always the authoritative source; if it’s on the wiki would it be editable by anyone? If so, I wouldn’t like that.
It feels like there are better ways to approach this.
What exactly is the goal, the problem that’s being solved, the benefit of archiving on the wiki? I’m reading through your article again and I’m getting confused.
I agree that not all the content is “article material.” In fact some of it is way off-topic — not even related to MySQL at all. I’d like to see the content filtered better, otherwise as more feeds are added I’ll have to unsubscribe or find some other way to filter what I see more.
Sure your website is the authoritative source – but people looking for resources will have to travel to your website (and many other websites) just to find out topics on items.
This is why there are centralized sources of information. That was the goal of the Forge. Catalog projects, and collate documentation.
Sure the wiki is editable by anyone (registered). But that could also mean that if your content is valid for MySQL 5 and something has changed in 5.1, and there have been no updates in the last one month, someone within the community might find it useful to update it.
The idea is for colloboration. There’s some really good quality content on Planet MySQL, that could become articles on the wiki as it enters some sort of base where information is kept.
The end goal is that its always easier to find for all end users. I think that’s the real aim.
Remember credit/copyright is still yours. People will know you as the authoritative source. But it also gives people the option to extend on your knowledge. Thats what Wikipedia represents, right?
I don’t necessarily like the idea of publishing on the wiki.
However, having a search functionality on the ‘planet archives would be REALLY REALLY nice.
I wouldn't want to publish on the wiki. I already spend a lot of time thinking about and writing my articles; making them available elsewhere is what RSS is for.
If it's archived somewhere automatically, I wouldn't mind, as long as it's always clear where the content originated. Syndication shouldn't mean losing my control over the fact that I'm the author and my website is always the authoritative source; if it's on the wiki would it be editable by anyone? If so, I wouldn't like that.
It feels like there are better ways to approach this.
What exactly is the goal, the problem that's being solved, the benefit of archiving on the wiki? I'm reading through your article again and I'm getting confused.
I agree that not all the content is “article material.” In fact some of it is way off-topic — not even related to MySQL at all. I'd like to see the content filtered better, otherwise as more feeds are added I'll have to unsubscribe or find some other way to filter what I see more.