Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 11:49:26 +0100 (BST) From: Gavin Atkinson <gavin@FreeBSD.org> To: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com> Cc: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Annotation for doc review Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1407101142190.44577@ury.york.ac.uk> In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.11.1407041441510.27613@wonkity.com> References: <alpine.BSF.2.11.1407041441510.27613@wonkity.com>
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On Fri, 4 Jul 2014, Warren Block wrote: > We've talked before about having periodic reviews of parts of the > documentation. It turns out that experts rarely read the docs on things they > know about, but are the ones that can produce very valuable feedback. > > Ideally, we'd be able to show a rendered HTML version of the document and let > people comment on it. > > There are commercial services out there for that, but also free Javascript > implementations that we could use directly, like this: > > http://annotatorjs.org/ I'd be very happy to see something like this. > Note that I am not suggesting this would go on our documentation web pages. Could you elaborate as to why you think this is a bad idea? I think a significant part of the benefit is receiving comments from people who only drop into the documentation for a few seconds and then vanish again. These are the sort of people who are unlikely to go out of their way to reiew docs for us, but might leave a comment if there was an easy mechanism to do so. PostgreSQL used to have a facility to comment directly on the web page, though they seem to have instead moved to a forum approach. Could we also consider that perhaps? I don't know how easy it would be for every page to have its own section on the forum, but maybe that could work? Though I do very much prefer their old approach, to be honest. > Instead, we would create a small rendered version of part of a document, say > one subsection out of a chapter, and put that up somewhere for review and > annotation. At the end of a limited time, maybe a week or two, the > annotations would be gone through, adapted, and changes applied. Then the > process is repeated for a different documentation section. The annotated web > page is just temporary. > > The biggest problems I see are > > user authentication: so we can avoid spam and vandalism, and track > suggestions by user. For best results, this would use existing > credentials and not require creating a new account To some extent, we only need to avoid spam if the suggestions are not immediately published. If there is some moderation process before they become visible, that would likely be suficient. Gavin
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