RE: Hosting of the cookbook

MJ Ray wrote:

> On 2004-04-05 15:51:00 +0100 Noel Welsh <noelwelsh-/[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > --- MJ Ray <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> I don't care. By schematics-maintained I mean "this
> >> bit schematicians can edit/review (so should be mostly correct), but
> >> anyone can add annotations as they wish."
> > This restricts the number of people who can contribute
> > to the cookbook. [...]
>
> ITYM "edit" not "contribute". I'm not sure that restricting the number
> of editors is undesirable for a programming cookbook.
>
> Will incorrect entries be quickly fixed? The poster-children of
> wikidom like wikipedia and Portland Patterns get fixed quickly, but my
> experience is that other sites require constant attention from their
> original sponsors.

That's a good point.  But won't this mean that it becomes up to the editors
to integrate new material, so instead of working to "police" contributions
that don't fit, some work will have to be done for many or most
contributions, even good ones, to make the cookbook hold together rather
than be a ragtag collection of random contributions?

I've seen sites with such random collections, and they're not that useful
because there may be ten solutions to a given problem, and most or all of
them might suck.  Someone has to do editing work to correct that.  If the
original contributors are responsible and sensible, they can do at least
some of that work.

It comes down to how much you trust the contributors.  We have no way to
assess that for sure right now, but the small size and quality of the Scheme
community seems to argue that we can expect reasonably responsible
contributors.

Afaict, the Scheme community is nowhere near comparable in size to that of
the major wikis, or Postgres, PHP, Python, Perl, or even Common Lisp.  Since
we do have a versioning capability, and very little content right now to
protect, it seems to me that the easiest and most obvious thing is just to
set some guidelines, and open it up.  If we start having problems with too
many contributors doing things we don't like, I think we'll be able to
consider that quite an achievement.  I'm guessing it won't happen for quite
while, and we can deal with it when it does.

Anton



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