Python docs disappointing - group effort to hire writers?

Dave Angel davea at ieee.org
Fri Aug 7 08:15:11 EDT 2009


alex23 wrote:
> Paul Rubin <http://phr...@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
>   
>> The PHP docs as I remember are sort of regular (non-publically
>> editable) doc pages, each of which has a public discussion thread
>> where people can post questions and answers about the topic of that
>> doc page.  I thought it worked really well.  The main thing is that
>> the good stuff from the comment section gets folded into the actual
>> doc now and then.
>>     
>
> I'd still like to see this kept out of the official docs as much as
> possible, mostly for reasons of brevity & clarity. I think the
> official docs should be considered definitive and not require a
> hermeneutic evaluation against user comments to ensure they're still
> correct...
>
> How about a secondary site that embeds the docs and provides
> commenting functionality around it? That's certainly a finitely scoped
> project that those with issues about the docs could establish and
> contribute to, with the possibility of it gaining official support
> later once it gains traction.
>
>
>   
I share your concern about unmonitored comments.  However, it seems a 
useful possibility would be for the "official" pages to each have 
specially-marked links that possibly lead to such user comments.  
Clearly they'd have to marked carefully, so that naive users don't 
confuse the two.  But otherwise, it feels like a good idea.

In my case, I usually access the docs via the Windows help file.  So 
it'd be quite easy for me to recognize that once I've gotten to a 
browser page, I'm not in Kansas any more.  But that could be also 
accomplished by having a very different stylesheet for the user comments 
page.

DaveA




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