Oops. I can't believe I said that.
Drupal has a long tradition of insisting that everybody's contribution is equal, that every piece of content is equal. We have to stop that.
It's nearly impossible to find the critical content on d.o and has been for a very long time. How do we fix this? Enlist the community.
Here are some broad brushstrokes:
- Differentiate content.
- Use flag module to mark content as useful, mark it as spam, mark comments as issue summaries, mark modules and themes as "I use this" and lots of other things.
- Curate more content. Can't we have articles on drupal.org promoted to the planet?
- Allow comments on modules and themes.
- Differentiate users. There are plenty of ways to do this without ranking users against each other or giving numbers to users. A module maintainer badge? A 5-year member badge? Infrastructure team badge?
- Find a leader (or pair of leaders) whose job is to promote the quality of the content of drupal.org. Right now, we tend to make decisions on things only based on infrastructure requirements, but we need to be thinking about content and usability far more than infra and performance. (I'm not saying that we shouldn't pay attention to performance, just that having a functional, usable site is far more important than the underlying infrastructure.)
OK, let's get started.
* Flagging individual comments as issue summaries
* Improving Flag module query efficiency
* Allow flagging content "Was this useful"
* Allow Planet promotion of d.o content
I should mention, Neil Drumm has made tremendous progress providing a documented path and tools to let ordinary mortals work on improvements to drupal.org. See So you want to make Drupal.org awesome?.
Note that this is crossposted from http://randyfay.com/node/104, because posting it there means that people might read it. Starting it here would get a much smaller audience :-)
Comments
Viz: Drupal.org content audit
Viz: Drupal.org content audit approach
awesome ideas. Besides that,
awesome ideas. Besides that, its not really clear to me what the action items are from you post? as mentioned by @Mile23 I was also wondering how this tied into the content audit that lisarex initiated?
However, I'm afraid that differentiating users creates community division and I don't understand how it leasds to better content? To me it seems content can be both fairly and clearly objectified. facts are facts. people, on the other hand, are more complex.
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mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
Not *ranking* users. Just differentiating.
Right now, insiders have a vast knowledge of who is who, and they use it to get things done. Newbies (or even those who aren't intimate with the community) have no idea. Would it do so very much harm to have a "module maintainer" badge and a "documentation lead" badge?
The fundamental action items are figuring out ways for content and users to be differentiated using simple techniques. Links are provided to several issues.
Don't we already have
Don't we already have that?
although, perhaps it would have been best if I started by saying I think you do a great job helping out on Drupal.org / gdo, etc. I'm mostly just playing devil's advocate. I also get that sometimes these discussions can just be a time-sink, and we have to accept that not everyone is going to agree. But both of your examples already exist, IMO. if I click on your user: http://drupal.org/user/30906 I quickly find that you do friggin everything! click on mine, and you find out I'm less involved.
So... part of what I'm saying is that in my years of drupal community, I've never fully figured out how to utilize other people to get things done...? I've mostly attributed it to my inability to get work done with either IRC or twitter on, so I seldom use either. I'm sure there are other factors. But are you saying that perhaps I'm missing a whole bunch more? Maybe I just don't get it?
But my worry is it feels like a slippery slope. Kinda like invite-only: http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-initiatives -- really? ... a public invite-only group just feels snobbish and cliquey. IMO, its a missed opportunity. If the goal is really trying to keep noise down - the answer to me seems to be: a clear set of rules and moderation. teach others how to help eliminate noise. use flag module or similar to do it. but keeping people out is divisive, and I guess that's how I took your suggestion in your original post.
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mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
rfay I agree that badges are
rfay I agree that badges are very useful. Reddit uses it to show user levels of contribution. Also webchick put this chart up http://drupal.org/node/1206660 that we can now point people to and say 'Here are our fearless leaders!'
I completely agree. There is
I completely agree. There is a TON of content on drupal.org, and the amount of content there is growing on a daily basis. It's becoming harder and harder to find the pages that really matter, that actually answer the question you're asking, and even those that may contain useful gems you didn't even know you were looking for.
Personally I think we should start with the lowest common denominator. A flag on all pages (or maybe just documentation related pages) on drupal.org that simply asks "Was this page helpful. Yes or No?". This is something that would be fairly trivial to implement and I honestly feel like anyone would have a hard time arguing that it's a bad idea.
In the long term I would like to see more metrics on what pages/modules/themes are gold and which are crap but for now lets just start with something simple that we can all easily agree on an approach to and then one the system is in place to flag content we can figure out how to apply it to some more "debatable" items like modules/themes/people.
Gathering a simple +/- 1 metric on pages on drupal.org could be useful in a lot of ways. Users stumbling across a page could quickly asses the quality of content on the page. If you find multiple pages with different approaches to the same problem you'll be able to quickly get an idea of what is or isn't working for other people. We'll have metrics that we can use in weighting search results. It'll help those of us interested in improving the content on drupal.org find and fix the pages in the handbook that need the most help. Those with a big "NO" on them will be obvious candidates for an update. I'm sure there are lots of other potential benefits but those are just a few that come to mind.
Another reason that I think we should work on getting something like this in place quickly and not necessarily waiting on a project like the Prairie initiative in order to get started is that this is a quick and easy win. We can start gathering metrics now, and then projects like Prairie can come along and figure out useful things to do with the metrics we're gathering.
So, all of that said. A big +1 from for getting flag module sorted out and implementing a simple "Was this helpful, Yes or No?" flag on content. Get that in place, and then extend it to comments.
I think this was said
I think this was said already.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/136719
Here is a post discussing support.drupal.org that should be like a stackoverflow clone.
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Support is one piece
I'm totally in favor of the support initiative (and working on it). But support is just one piece of a huge puzzle. Comments should be differentiated, users should be differentiated. Handbook pages should be ordered based on their usefulness. Unuseful things should drift off into oblivion. All these things are far more general than the support initiative.
Some moderation could be useful
I must admit that I stumble more and more often across posts, comments that are not very useful, BUT that is to me. I have often gathered ideas by reading some post or comment that only barely related to the topic at hand, but provided me with the spark to move on with what I am working on.
That said I often find duplicate content by different authors in How To's Snippets, and other topics on how to approach a certain problem. I believe a stackoverflow like voting system could be valuable. That way an answer/solution could float closer to the problem and not having to read through several pages of Q's and back and forth. But for that to work the original poster must also have input on how s/he solved the orig. problem.
It is something to carefully to consider and implement without alienating newer user and still encouraging to read (RT*M, LOL). I do spend A LOT of time on drupal.org trying to sift through tons of information when I am trying to solve a problem, before posting a question.
Organization of content is also a big problem, since a piece of content could relate to multiple areas, but the book approach limits it so live on a certain category. Not sure if the tag system is helping or confusing users.
Well just throwing my 2 cents in here and i think a lot of community web sites will encounter this problem sooner or later. How do you keep user contributed content relevant to the user? When I have a solution I'll report back - see you when I'm old grey!