[meta] the haskell wiki management
Hi, this is what happened to me recently. Recently I had the opportunity to join the community around XMonad, a project, you should know something about it, led by some well know haskellers. It's a very exiting project, and by joining it you have the opportunity to code with people who know Haskell very well. Moreover those guys are very friendly and willing to help newcomers like me. Thanks to them I came to build up some knowledge about X window programming in Haskell - Robert and Spencer being my two principal mentors. I have this problem of mine, that when I feel grateful to someone I must find a way to get even, and I thought that writing a tutorial for newcomers could be a form of paying back the XMonad community, a subgroup of the Haskell community after all. I though that using the Haskell wiki was appropriate, so I started writing down what I learned thanks to those guys. As you may understand writing a tutorial is time consuming: not only you have to write the code and the code must be possibly clear. But I have also another problem: English is not my mother tongue, I'm sure you know that by now. So, while writing - eventually it took me up to 20 hours of work to finish the tutorial -, I started a new wiki page and updated it as new stuff was written: "X Window Programming in Haskell" was the page title. Then suddenly, Sunday night, I could not find my page anymore. So I went to "recent changes" to find out that someone had decided to change the page title to "X window programming", right after editing it. Not to remove some of the huge amount of typos, not to rephrase a sentence that a (properly) English speaker could not understand, not to debug some code, not to improve the content. No, just to enforce a rule, written here: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/HaskellWiki:Guidelines A rule that reads: "Titles should use sentence-style capitalization (see [1] - wikipedia). Capitalizing more words seems to be only appropriate in larger documents like books." "Seems to be only appropriate in larger documents like books." This makes me laugh, really. I got really upset and went to the talk page of the guy who moved the page to ask for an explanation. And I moved the page back to its original title: it was not a tutorial about x window programming, but about x window programming in Haskell. And so I found out these guidelines I was not even aware of. And that people were actually enforcing them. Now, that's fine, it is a wiki after all, and authorship must be forgotten. I didn't have this feeling when I discovered the wiki for the first time. In many tutorial you could and still can find a signature. You know, I'm an academic type of guy: I don't care about copyright at all, but I care a lot about authorship. I know, this is my fault. Now, what happened next? The guy I was upset with decided to change the rules and added this to the guidelines page: "When doing a signficant renaming of a page, (i.e., something more than just correcting the case as per the guidelines), use the "Discuss this page" link to suggest the new title and the reasons why. After a reasonable amount of time, if there are no objections, go ahead and move / rename the page." But five minutes later he also decided that it was time for the new rule to be violated by the rule setter himself, and renamed other tutorials of mine, something I've written a year ago or so, without making any suggestion in the discussion page. You know, changing a wiki page title means breaking all links to that page from other sites. So, changing an old page title, means taking that page off the Net. This is fine with me and my contributions to the Haskell wiki: useless stuff that is better not reading than reading. On the other side, I'm not going to stand such behaviour and I'm not going to write a single word on that wiki anymore. I removed my signature from the x window tutorial. I'm human too, I would add. Nonetheless I do not understand if this is an explicit policy of getting rid of unwanted contributors, like me, or just a stupid way of managing a collective resource like a wiki. Having a group of people in charge of setting, enforcing and violating rules at their will is a nice form of government, that usually pisses people off. And it is very difficult to adopt such an attitude to piss only unwanted people off. You usually end up repelling people you would like to attract too. I believe it is inevitable. This is the only reason I'm writing this. Sorry for such a long useless letter, but I've seen that the Haskell community loves to talk about maintaining itself, and so on. I thought that my 2 cents could be enjoyable too. Regards, Andrea Rossato
Hi Andrea,
I though that using the Haskell wiki was appropriate, so I started writing down what I learned thanks to those guys.
It is certainly a good place to put it!
Then suddenly, Sunday night, I could not find my page anymore.
On renaming a page, doesn't a redirect get placed from the old page to the new page? If so, that should allow anyone with the old URL to get automatically redirected to the new URL. If not, then that is a technical measure we can take to address the problem of pages moving.
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/HaskellWiki:Guidelines
A rule that reads: "Titles should use sentence-style capitalization (see [1] - wikipedia). Capitalizing more words seems to be only appropriate in larger documents like books."
It is useful to have the wiki be consistent, so that pages have a similar style. As an English/British person, that rule seems entirely wrong with respect to what I know about titles - but its a price you pay for consistency.
You know, changing a wiki page title means breaking all links to that page from other sites. So, changing an old page title, means taking that page off the Net.
Not if the redirect is done, certainly wikipedia does this. Clearly something here has violated the "be friendly" policy which I think is the most important policy that governs all wiki/IRC/mailing list stuff. If something as simple as a redirect can solve it all, then great. Perhaps mailing the person in question directly would be a wise idea? I hope they were acting in good faith, trying to do what they thought was best, and the medium of the internet has corrupted what would have been a perfectly pleasant face-to-face conversation. Thanks Neil
On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 11:14:59AM +0100, Neil Mitchell wrote:
You know, changing a wiki page title means breaking all links to that page from other sites. So, changing an old page title, means taking that page off the Net.
Not if the redirect is done, certainly wikipedia does this.
I must confess I did not know about this redirect stuff, and I apologize for that. I did not want to insinuate that changing the page title was done with the intent of taking that page off the Net, either. I thought it was only an unintended by product of the renaming.
Clearly something here has violated the "be friendly" policy which I think is the most important policy that governs all wiki/IRC/mailing list stuff. If something as simple as a redirect can solve it all, then great.
I don't think you are right on this point. I do not think that what happened to me is due to some kind of personal problem. I think that the person I had some problem with, did so because he perceived that in doing so he was improving the wiki. And he is probably right. This is why I addressed the issue openly. I think it's a problem of wiki management. Producing wiki content is a difficult task, not much less than writing good software. It takes time, and you get no public recognition - yes, you can sign the page but the reader doesn't perceive he's using it as it would with a piece of code. In other words, you must be double motivated to write wiki content like a long tutorial. Sometimes you write it for teaching people how to use your software, indeed. You must be very careful with rising the level of entrance with guidelines and other rules. And if you do that, you must be very careful not to use those rules in a way that is perceived as unmotivated. It turned out that one of the rules that was applied to me was wrongly applied. And it was wrongly applied because no attention to the content I was writing had been paid. And I had to invest time to get the problem sorted out. Now, having people messing with the content you are providing, without paying attention to it, just to have it conformed to some stylistic guidelines is just what pisses the author off. Am I right? Why not using this energy to help the author with the content itself. Isn't this *the* wiki way? I'm asking because I invested time in wiki technologies myself. I was the author of a wiki - UniWakka it was called - and I had to face wiki management issues too. I do believe that some kind of style should be imposed by the software itself, without any more guidelines. Some lack of uniformity may be the price to be paid to have a leaving, ever growing wiki. If you want a nice looking web site, well, stay away from wikis. But this is a topic we can discuss if someone has some interest in it. Thanks for your kind attention. Andrea
On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 11:14:59AM +0100, Neil Mitchell wrote:
You know, changing a wiki page title means breaking all links to that page from other sites. So, changing an old page title, means taking that page off the Net.
Not if the redirect is done, certainly wikipedia does this.
btw, it should be clear that wiki page titles are URI and as such they should be treated and the relevant RFC should be applied to them. Redirects is not a solution: changing an URI should be avoided as possible. http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI I think that wiki management means taking care of this issue too. All the best, Andrea
participants (2)
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Andrea Rossato -
Neil Mitchell