help wanted

Information and discussion about the BR Wiki.

Moderators: Susan Smith, admin, Gabriel

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John
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Apr 26, 2009 8:27 am

help wanted

Post by John »

Why don't you contribute to the BR! Wiki :?:
gordon
Posts: 358
Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2009 6:02 pm

Post by gordon »

Was this a general question for everyone?
John
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Apr 26, 2009 8:27 am

Post by John »

yes - this is a general question for everyone.

your answer may be something like:

* I just don't care about the BR!Wiki - I don't use it anyway
* It's too big of a pain to login before editing
* I don't understand wiki syntax
* I didn't know I was allowed to fix stuff
* I'm terribly intimidated by John and his mass changes
* Documentation is for whimps
* I'm affraid if I changed something I'd be responsible for something

No answer is wrong.

Also - Thank you in advance for your feedback.

-John
Susan Smith
Posts: 717
Joined: Sun Aug 10, 2008 4:24 am
Location: Southern California

Post by Susan Smith »

John,

I find the wiki quite valuable and I use it almost every day. (My middle aged brain can't remember as much as it used to!) Unfortunately with BRGroup conference planning (which is underway now), conference book publishing, forum moderating and completely rewriting my application for BR 4.2 right now, I feel like I have bitten off as much as I can handle.

Having said that, I am extremely guilty of inadequately expressing my appreciation for your work on this wiki. I am so glad to have this tool. It saves my bacon every day and I'm sure that I'm not the only one. Thank you sincerely for the countless hours that I KNOW you have put into it.

Perhaps it would help if you could be more specific in what kind of help you are looking for, such as:

Are you rewriting some section of the wiki? What section and why? (what is the objective?)
Help with incorporating release notes as they become available?
Proof-reading older material to remove duplicates?
Separating keywords or topics to their own pages?
Other?

I don't think that many people know what is involved behind the scenes on the wiki, so you may get more responses if you can "carve out" specific tasks so people can volunteer for a more precise job that needs "doing". Most people are hesitant to sign on for vague or open-ended things, but if they know the limits of the job, they may feel that they can take that part on.

-- Susan
John
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Apr 26, 2009 8:27 am

Post by John »

This is an excellent answer susan - correct me if i'm wrong but basiclly you've stated:

"because no one has ask me to"
and
"because i don't know what i should do"

For those of you replying by email rather than via our forum (ahm Gabriel, Makhail) - you're votes won't be counted.

Thank you for the feed back and please let me know any other thoughts as to why you're not contributing to the wiki.

While I do appreciate the praise I really hope to clearly identify why those of us that use this resource do not contribute even spelling or grammar corrections, much less bigger things. I don't want to lay out a list of what's not being done (at least not yet)... I'm just trying to collect a little info about what you feel keeps you from contributing to the wiki.

oh and btw - most of the content of the wiki comes from george and susan and their 1000+ page BR! Manual. My contributions are a drop in the bucket in comparison.

-john
Gabriel
Posts: 412
Joined: Sun Aug 10, 2008 7:37 am
Location: Arlington, TX
Contact:

Post by Gabriel »

1) for small changes its too much of a pain in the begonias to log in just to make some little change.
2) for large changes I often don't have enough time to fix what I want to fix
3) for layout changes and reorganization changes (thats what the wiki needs most by far, there's really good information in there, its just hard to find what you're looking for), Its a combination of three reasons - its a hassle to log in, i often dont have time, and its confusing to figure out the syntax to get the links all working properly, as well as find the proper place to link each thing to.

If the change is only in one document I generally fix it, and when I have time I fix all sorts of things in the wiki. So any time the above reasons didn't apply to me, I probably did change the forum but when one of the above reasons applies to me I end up not fixing the wiki.
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