Re: [Delayed] Summary of the web team BoF at DC18

Sean Whitton <[email protected]> Thu, 13 Sep 2018 07:04:00 -0700

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.www
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hello,

On Thu 13 Sep 2018 at 04:02AM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:

> Content
> -------
>
> We have too much content on the website. Good content is great, but
> very old stuff that hasn't been updated in a decade and is now
> clearly out of date is really not helpful. Really old information for
> users about how to use Debian isn't valuable, and is more likely to
> put people off or maybe even be dangerous.
>
> With too much content, it's also likely to put people off when they
> want to change things. Which pages need changing? Which ones are users
> actually finding? It's difficult to know, and demotivating.
> [...]
>  * Time for a fresh start? Maybe competition for students? Will it
>  work on all devices? Is our information relevant now? We have many
>  years of cruft that's been building up.  + Move stuff to an archive
>  if we care, with clear warning "this is historical information"
> [...]
> We have general agreement for removing lots of content and shrinking
> our website a lot. Shout now if you disagree!

I'd like to encourage marking stuff as historical-and-maybe-outdated
rather than just removing it.  It would be fine to err on the side of
marking as historical; if the information is in fact still up-to-date,
the tag can just be removed.

The team can then focus their efforts on content that is not marked as
historical -- hopefully this would remove the problem of the large
amount of content being off-putting, without actually deleting very
much.

It's so hard to tell when information might be either useful or
interesting to someone, so it seems better to be cautious.

(The old DSAs, though, it seems fine to remove.)

-- 
Sean Whitton

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 832 B)