launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Max Bowsher <maxb@xxxxxxx>]

Karl Fogel wrote:
> In the Department of Meta-Departments Department (Supervisory Office):
> 
> Matthew Revell and I made many changes in the wiki today, one of which
> was to add a summary bar to the top of every page.  Then I thought "Hmm,
> how will people know to add the summary bar on new pages?"  That thought
> naturally led to writing a page about wiki conventions:
> 
>   https://dev.launchpad.net/WikiConventions
> 
> I've tried to keep it very short and not state obvious stuff.  We don't
> want to overwhelm contributors with a bunch of rules -- wikis should be
> lightweight to edit, both technically and socially.

The page currently says: "The summary bar should always end with a
sentence encouraging the reader to ask for help whenever they need it,
linking to the Help page."

I have two problems with this:

* It means there's a bit of boilerplate occupying the same visual space
as the summary, making the per-page information less accessible at a glance.

* I think it sets the wrong tone (treating users of the wiki as
excessively stupid) to repeat this exhortation on every single page.


Including the exhortation totally makes sense on pages like Getting or
Running, but for me provokes a "huh? what? random out of context
statement?" reaction from me on pages like https://dev.launchpad.net/Trunk.

If we really want a link to Help on every information-disseminating
page, I think it needs to be phrased more in keeping with the character
of the page (e.g. "If you have questions about the content of this page,
please [[Help|ask us!]]") and would preferably be in a separate style to
the per-page content such that people can easily start to ignore the
boilerplate once they're aware of it.

Max.

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