Re: Negatively Voted Notes

On Wed, Jul 10, 2024, at 9:18 AM, Derick Rethans wrote:
> Hi!
>
> There are currently nearly 20000 notes in the documentation, with many 
> having a very high negative rating.
>
> For example, there are:
>
> 1131 notes older than a year, with a rating less than -10
> 2339 notes older than a year, with a rating less than -5
> 5761 notes older than a year, with a rating less than -1
>
> The worst offender is:
>
> https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.cookies.php#128286 with -159 
> (not sure why the website says -153)
> https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.attributes.overview.php#126887 
> with -104 
>
> We discussed this during one of our foundation meetings, and we propose:
>
> - to delete all notes with a rating less than -5 that are older than a 
>   year.
> - come up with a plan to crowd source going through the other thousands 
>   of notes to see if they need to be deleted or integrated into the 
>   actual text. Each documentation page now has a link to the XML source
>   (such as https://github.com/php/doc-en/blob/master/language/attributes.xml)
>
> Comments?

I had proposed something similar on the docs list a while back, and some folks were squeamish.  I'm still in favor, though, including making it a regular cron job.

I've also done a fair bit of triage of incoming comments, and in practice we delete most of them.  Extremely few of the comments that come in are improvements for the docs.  They're people using notes as a help forum, or a blog to show off their utility functions, or write buggy polyfills that get corrected 4 times by other people.  And that's excluding the obvious spam.

I have at times gone through and cleaned up an individual page, usually knocking the number of comments down from 40-something to 3-ish.  Most get deleted, a small number turn into PRs.

I think I have personally found a note useful... once, maybe twice, in as far back as my memory goes.

I would be perfectly OK with just turning notes off entirely, though we should still triage them for any gems worthy of turning into PRs.  But beyond that, let people just file a PR.  Making notes readonly would get a+1 from me.

--Larry Garfield