Re: Wikis [was: Re: Tutorial]

[John Mandereau]

Valentin Villenave wrote:
> 2006/12/5, John Mandereau <address@hidden>:
> >
> > 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.

Newly-arrived users sometimes have great ideas. I have



> > 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...

Yes, if you can find
> > 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.

The French translation will be available soon on lilypond.org.
Graham has a plan to centralize snippets (I mean you could find almost
all code snippets in one place), but I don't know the current state of
this.


> 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... :)

No, you're not. Organising the contents is certainly more difficult than
writing bits of documentation.


> 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 ?

Putting the footer links again only require one-line fix in a build
script and a small setup in a wiki. If the developers agree, and if you
promise to write comments ;-), I may set it up on the tuxfamily.org
wiki.


> 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.

No, it isn't dead. It's just sleeping. You are of course welcome to
contribute! For example, you could add links to tutorial stuff you cand
find on the Web to the "Tutorial and examples" page
http://lilypondwiki.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Tutorials_and_examples

There is also a small to-do list at "Community portal", and the
guidelines on
http://lilypondwiki.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=LilypondWiki:Guidelines

Good luck ;-)

-- 
John Mandereau <address@hidden>