Re: How, precisely, can we improve?

Makes sense, no problem! I think my main personal complaints with docs have been: Poor discoverability — neither wikis nor search solve this, I want a dir listing. Slow search — almost every wiki has slow search. bouncing out to google is annoying. just let me grep. Broken links — this is particularly annoying as unis like to shut down student accounts hosting papers. I had to do some archaeology on an obscure Chinese FTP server to find some of Don Stewart's papers and slides recently. I believe there can be a convincing solution to all of this and more. On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 11:33 PM, Moritz Angermann wrote:

Chris,

I’m all in favor of a better system! My only intention was to point to a solution that might help with the current system, right now.

I’ve come to use that feature quite frequently even outside of this specific use case, as many of the results are often full of interesting yet stale information.

Anyhow, I don’t want to obligate anyone to do anything, and if this was perceived that way, I’m truly sorry.

Cheers, Moritz

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On Sep 29, 2016, at 12:24 PM, Christopher Allen wrote:

Why not just do the better thing to begin with rather than obligating people to think to use this feature? Most, even those who know it's an option, aren't going to think to do this in the heat of trying to track down an answer to something.

On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 11:08 PM, Moritz Angermann wrote:

...

Just a quick note: Google provides the “Date range” filter found under search options. This allows to narrow down the date range.

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On Sep 29, 2016, at 11:55 AM, Bardur Arantsson wrote:

On 2016-09-29 04:43, Richard Eisenberg wrote:

...

Here's a pre-proposal (which could be formalized into a proper proposal) to address the wiki discussion:

- Configure the wiki to display the date of last edit prominently.

- If the date of last edit is sufficiently long ago (1 year?) loudly warn the reader that the content may be out-of-date.

I see at least one major issue with this: Search engines don't care if you write "THIS MAY BE OUT OF DATE" on the page. It's a perennial problem that search engines keep linking out of date material just because such material tends to be linked more (simply because of age).

There are few tings as infuriating as going through a bunch of search results and getting pages from 10 years ago.

Regards,

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-- Chris Allen Currently working on http://haskellbook.com

-- Chris Allen Currently working on http://haskellbook.com