RE: Hosting of the cookbook

On 2004-04-13 16:10:09 +0100 Noel Welsh <noelwelsh-/[email protected]> wrote:

> My preference is for wiki-esque free edits vs
> privileged immutable recipes and annotations.  Why? It
> allows recipes to be iteratively refined to
> perfection,

It also means you will never stabilise at the best possible recipe. If 
we really have an active community, it seems similar to a simplistic 
Genetic Algorithm approach to cookbook authorship.

> versus the reader reading and integrating all the
> comments to obtain the final version (A small example
> in the Python cookbook is
> http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/194373)

Why do people keep referring to that one? It seems to be a polar 
opposite that has more severe editor qualification than anyone has 
suggested here. Please stop it. Even I think we should have a more 
open editor approach than that. I could equally well refer to 
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki as an example of why a wiki can't produce a 
good cookbook, but I don't. It's just not relevant to this discussion.

> This makes several assumptions about the community:
> potential editors, like me, are lazy and won't do much
> work :-) and the contributors will be of high quality
> so iterative revision will improve not decrease
> quality.

Non-working editors will hinder the book in either model. I don't 
think that is a valid argument either way.

Have we any data to favour the assumption of "iterative revision will 
improve not decrease quality" over "some contributors will goof 
sometimes"? People edit trivially-checkable correct information in 
wikipedia to incorrect.

> - some sort of flow control to stop robots hammering
> the site (e.g. edits only allowed every 20 seconds)

That needs to be a bit more sophisticated, else quick typo fixes get 
rejected, which is really annoying. Maybe "max 3 edits a minute from 
an IP" but some spam-robots trickle edits to try to avoid being 
spotted in logfiles on busy wikis now.

-- 
MJR/slef     My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ [email protected]
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