2009/3/29 Andre Roberge <andre.roberge@gmail.com>:

I have been given permission to edit the edu-sig page (http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/edu-sig/) on the official Python web site.  Think of me as the Benevolent Edu-Sig Slave For Now, answering to the community as to what changes you'd like to see being made on that page.

So, I am looking for community input as to what kind of changes you'd like to see. Before you go wild with suggestions, I'd like to share a some observations and a suggestion.

1. Doing changes to that page involves an official commit to the svn repository.  As other people might be monitoring changes, I don't want to overwhelm them with tons of small commits.

Please don't worry about this. Go wild. Do what's right for yourself and the edu-sig community, please don't worry about people watching the changes fly by. We're quite used to ignoring email out here. :-)

2.a) There is a lot of material on that page that is duplicated (sometimes poorly) with information that can be found elsewhere.  For example, the section "Shells and Editors" contains links to http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEditors and http://wiki.python.org/moin/IntegratedDevelopmentEnvironments, in addition to actual links to a few tools.

I like the idea of not having too much duplicate information (which will inevitably get out of sync at some point), but at the same time I would warn for trying to "normalize" this kind of information *too* much. If commonly needed info is three clicks away, most people won't have given up before finding it.

2.b) Note the "wiki" part of the two links mentioned in 2.a) above.  This means that YOU can edit such pages, without having to send me an email with you thoughts, waiting for me to act on it, worrying about me selectively editing the information you submit, etc.

So, I am thinking that the edu-sig page should become a high level description of what is available elsewhere and that a lot of the "meat" should be actually hosted on wiki.python.org - which could be kept up to date much more easily and much more effectively by the community as a whole.

Beware though, wiki pages often go stale without anybody noticing for a long time. Another problem with wikis is that well-meaning contributors often insert duplicate information into different places, which will just bewilder the readers. A good strategy to deal with this is to have someone (or several people, if it's a large and active wiki) who watches changes and occasionally cleans things up, perhaps moving things around so that they are linked more logically, adding cross-links, deleting outdated information, etc. Spam probably *won't* be a big problem, except possibly for the wiki's front page (spammers are lazy). Note that the wiki also has a mechanism that can send email when a page is changed. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)