maria-docs team mailing list archive

[Colin Charles <colin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

On 29 Nov 2011, at 05:14, Shaun McCance wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> What are your thoughts on adding stub articles/sections to the KB?
> For example, adding an article for how to specify account names
> without actually writing the content, along with a note to whoever
> comes along about what the article should contain.
> 

I think stub articles are great, but I also think we have some problems with stubs that say, Wikipedia won't have:
1. will we create and forget about stubs (I have in the past -- now we have Pending articles)
2. who moderates once stubs get created? Wikipedia has a very active community of editors. Removing spam is comparatively easy, ensuring quality is a whole other thing (I know now Daniel does a lot of this)
3. how do we drive people to create articles that are in stubs?

Question #3 interests me greatly.

Wikipedia is free of ads, and you see Jimmy Wales beg you at the end of every year. The KB has ads (which I prefer, to begging, fwiw)
Wikipedia is free-form knowledge. The KB is focused on SQL, MySQL, MariaDB (what I would consider more niche - i.e. barrier to entry is higher)

> I've seen stubs work well in other docs efforts. They're an easy
> way for contributors to cherry pick work. But with the "everything
> is always published" model of a wiki-like KB, stubs can be annoying
> to average readers, like a 90s-esque "under construction" banner.

Stubs can be mighty annoying when you're looking for something via search and all you find is a stub

I wonder if it will also hurt our Google rankings? More stubs = less content = "spam" site. Do we know the impact stubs have on this (and we can't compare to Wikipedia, because we know that there is whitelisting of sites in their search engine -- see recent thread on "hacker news" in where they were not #1 any longer and Matt Cutts, search maestro/webspam dude at Google chimed in to help)

If the benefits outweigh the potential cons, I'm all for stubs

	cheers,
	-c
--
Colin Charles, http://bytebot.net/blog/ | twitter: @bytebot | skype: colincharles
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