how to disturb newbies

[Peter M. Brigham]

On Oct 26, 2014, at 11:06 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> Jacques Hausser wrote:
> 
> >> Le 26 oct. 2014 à 03:27, Kay C Lan a écrit :
> >
> >> Again, I FULLY SUPPORT Richard's recommendation that if anyone
> >> notices any errors or even believes there should be better examples,
> >> Notes, Tips or inclusions in the Dictionary and User Guide, then
> >> PLEASE submit them to:
> >>
> >> http://quality.runrev.com/
> >>
> >> Whilst they may not appear in the next cycle, I do appreciate that an
> >> improved Dictionary is being worked on, and like LC itself, that has
> >> come forward leaps and bounds in the last year, I'm sure all the
> >> corrections the Community adds to the Bug DB in relation to the
> >> Dictionary will eventually come back to us in the form of much
> >> better documentation.
> >>
> >> After entry in the Bug DB, a quick post to this List giving everyone
> >> here a heads up of what you've found would also be much appreciated.
> >
> > I fully agree. The dictionary is very important to shape the first
> > impression of newcomers about LC. I have read and heard several
> > disparaging comments about the documentation which are a very
> > negative publicity for this fantastic product. I perfectly understand
> > that it is far more interesting and stimulating for the small staff
> > in Edinburgh to develop new features - and they are brilliant at that
> > - than devote time and energy to do the house cleaning on the
> > documentation. But it's a vital part of how their work is appreciated
> > outside. I would suggest Kevin to establish a weekly "hour of
> > dictionary cleaning" for everybody. Most of the dictionary problems
> > could be solved in such a short time.
> 
> Well said from both of you.  Hopefully we can channel some of the energy into useful outcomes.  After all, it takes about as much time to submit a bug report as it does to make a post about a bug to a user-to-user venue, but with a bug report it gets queued for action.
> 
> I'd like to see if we could put together a Community Documentation Team to help with some of the manual steps of applying those bug reports to the Dictionary entries themselves.
> 
> I'll be discussing this with Ben in our next Community meeting on Thursday.
> 
> If any of you are in a position to help with such an effort, please drop me a note at the address below and we'll set you up with whatever tools we come up with to make that happen.

One possible solution would be to build into the the native LC dictionary a userNotes feature, allowing the user to add comments or examples saved locally for her/his own reference, and within that feature allowing submission of a particular note to the community documentation team for curating for inclusion as a shared note for all users. Best of both worlds, AFAICS.

-- Peter

Peter M. Brigham
pmbrig at gmail.com
http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig