Posted by rfay on December 10, 2010 at 6:49pm
In Drupal development we have "core", which is carefully tended by a strong, collaborative community, and "contrib", which is pretty much wild west and has extremely low barriers to entry.
I propose that we do the same thing with the handbook.
- The "core" handbook would be curated and have
- Structure determined by docs leadership
- Moderated changes
- Curation managed through an issue queue
- Much higher Apache Solr search rankings than the "contrib" section.
- The "contrib" handbook would have
- No barriers to entry
- Only casual curation
- Pages or sections could be proposed for promotion to "core" handbook.
To clarify here, I'm not suggesting that we have a handbook about core Drupal and a handbook about contrib modules. I'm suggesting that we follow the development organization of Drupal and have a highly curated "core" handbook, and a not-curated "contrib" handbook. These would not be named "core" and "contrib". I'm just using those labels to explain the parallels to our development distinction between core and contrib.
Comments
...
We did have this structure at one time. It seems to have been re-organized out of existence since then.
Change in the 'core' docs wasn't so much moderated as it was monitored. The main controls being a lot of pages had images so you had to be in the right group to modify that input type. The goal at the time was that core end user documentation would be the primary focus of the documentation team and contrib documentation would be at the whims of the contributors. This was also done to scope things to be more manageable. Without the scope at the time it was overwhelming. There was a vocal group that thought contrib modules should be documented like core and while they were vocal about it they often wandered off after a while without really building anything sustainable.
I think the idea of flagging
I think the idea of flagging pages as "essential" (or whatever terminology we might use) could be really useful as far as directing the efforts of docs team and also denoting which pages are more official docs. But I definitely think that this should apply to the "big" contrib modules too.
The only thing I don't like about it is that it does seem like it's making some pages sound more valued than others, and I'm not sure if we'd have any special permissions regarding who could edit "essential" pages (which would be useful, but could be very exclusionary too, which wouldn't be great).
Definitely some pros to this, but I'm still on the fence.