Re: Wikis [was: Re: Tutorial]

[Valentin Villenave]

2006/12/5, John Mandereau <address@hidden>:
> There is already an unofficial wiki on
> http://lilypondwiki.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

OK my bad.
Though I thought I had indeed already seen there was a wiki somewhere,
I wasn't able to find where it was (the fact is, I only tried with
Google but I didn't think about looking for it on the mailing list
archive).
> It's easy to start a new wiki, a new documentation, a new whatever, but
> it's much harder to develop it on a long timescale.

As for me, I find wiki-based doc are a LOT easier for everyone to
contribute, improve, propose, translate, and -most off all- gain easy
and immediate access to every information they need. I've been
spending hours, literally, using Google's "site search" function to
look for some specific answers in Lily's current doc.

> Before reinventing the wheel, we should first look for what already
> exists (or has existed).

I don't think Christophe Dang Ngoc Chan is pretending to reinvent the
wheel (and neither am I, by the way). There is no need to blame
newly-arrived users who want to help, no matter how unconvenient their
ideas can be.

> 2) Johannes Schindelin has already developped a Mediawiki extension that
> can run LilyPond.

This is great. Looks like we get one more reason to use a wiki...

> As Graham and others have already pointed out, it'd be very cumbersome
> for the user to look for documentation at a dozen of places. Computer
> music engraving, and thus LilyPond, are so specialized that cluttered
> and concurrent sources of informations would really be a pain.
> IMHO everyone should think twice about it before creating a new source
> of information.

The fact is, there's obviously something wrong with the way Lilypond
documentation is given. A dozen of places, indeed :  I use almost
everyday : Lilypond snippet repository, Lily's official doc (not to
mention that sometimes you need to switch to v8 or v9 doc to find
something you need, then back again to v10 and so on), your site
john.mandereau.free.fr to figure out what this word mean in French,
etc., etc.

IMHO, the most obvious lack isn't a lack of content, but a lack of
intern links and "interface", so to say. Which means, and that's good
news, that maybe the problem isn't so deep and so hard to correct. But
maybe I'm reinventing the wheel here... :)

The point is, precisely, all of us should not attempt to create a new
source of information at all, but try to make existing Lilypond
Documentation as easy and user- or contributer-friendly as, say,
Wikipedia or anything else.

That said, I'm glad it already exists (means the idea was'nt _that_
bad), though it is unfortunately a bit hard to find. I can't
understand why it hasn't been a success. But maybe it would be worth
trying to to put the footer links again. Can this be done easily, or
does it means spending hours page-per-page ?

And one last thing : both Christophe and I, I guess, and many others
(that is, as far as they know there _is_ a wiki without having to read
the entire mailing list archive) would be happy to join you and
contribute to the existing wiki -unless you believe it is dead.

Once again, nobody's trying to do as if nobody hasn't been doing
anything here for ten years. So maybe a "Welcome on board, here's the
todo-list" would be more appreciated than the way you take it John...

Thank you.

V.Villenave.