[pydotorg-www] wiki maintenance ideas?

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Keeping a wiki up to date is certainly possible, but it's a lot
of work and needs people who care about it or at least parts of it.

Specifically for the beginners resources, I could imagine that
we'd find people who are interested in this, but asking on this
list is probably not a good way to reach them.

Perhaps you could try on the psf-community list.

We do have a page for this:

https://wiki.python.org/moin/SiteImprovements

but it's outdated.

Perhaps archiving the older bits and reviving the page with
more focus on the wiki would help. We could then also move it
up higher on the front page.

Thanks,
-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
Python Software Foundation
http://www.python.org/psf/
http://www.malemburg.com/


On 08.08.2017 17:52, Mats Wichmann wrote:
> 
> In an ideal world, interested parties fix things on the wiki when they
> find they have problems. And I'm heartened there's been a spate of
> link-fixing contributions recently, system working the way it's supposed
> to :)
> 
> Does it make any sense to think about any kind of more systematic
> maintenance activities?  Is wiki (content) maintenance even a possible
> thing? They are generally pretty notorious for this: it's a wiki, you
> can update it, but if you didn't just update it it's probably out of
> date and inaccurate.
> 
> There are really two things...
> 
> - errors.  links go stale all the time, is there any point in looking
> for a tool that could crawl the wiki infrequently (on the order of once
> every many months) to test if links outside the wiki still resolve to
> something and report problems?
> 
> - quality. Here are a couple of examples I ran into just this morning
> looking at some things that landed in the inbox.
> 
> The page on beginner errors:
> https://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnerErrorsWithPythonProgramming
> 
> got an update (broken link fixing only), and I was curious and looked at
> it.  It's not terribly useful as is - the notes also indicate it was
> imported from elsewhere. This *could* be a very useful page: as a
> python-tutor participant, I see common themes repeatedly; it would also
> be great to hear from instructors on what trips students up (I haven't
> taught a Python class since 2002 so I don't have any current
> contributions on that front). This page tried to do that, but then goes
> off in strange weeds... "The latter issue has been fixed, but the former
> has not and very likely never will".  Python is what it is, how about
> ideas for how to teach people in an anticipatory way to avoid well-known
> gotchas instead of focusing on how the language might or might not be
> "fixed"? Page still has references to "Python 3000", which means it's,
> ummm, fairly dated :)
> 
> One of the resources pages,
> https://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/Programmers
> 
> also had link-fix activity.  this page suffers from the "list of
> resources" problem, where a bunch of links are just dumped here with no
> ordering (how do you order them?), and once the lists get more than a
> few entries, it's hard to know what to follow. And every so often we can
> expect to go through "moving my link up to a better place" wars like
> we've seen before.  I found the Google class listed in two sections,
> both with old (but not yet broken) links to obsolete Google Code
> addresses, cleaned that up on the way past (there's only one copy now).
> 
> 
> Any thoughts on how resources like this could be made more useful?
> Maybe keep a wiki page of "if you feel like contributing to Python, here
> are some pages that could stand improvement"?
> 
> -- mats
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