On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 8:36 AM, Peter Bex
<address@hidden> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 08, 2011 at 12:09:11PM +0100, Alaric Snell-Pym wrote:
> >> The egg index is pretty nicely categorised as it is. Its certainly good
> >> enough for someone to search through, and quickly zero in on 1 or 2 (or 3)
> >> eggs of specific interest to the problem at hand. I'm not sure what else
> >> you can really do.
> >
> > Perhaps a bit of ranking? So eggs that are used a lot or that people
> > prefer to use are clearly distinguishable from the weird, broken,
> > useless or obsolete.
>
> A few ideas here:
>
> 1) Downgrade the display of not-yet-tagged eggs, that are "in
> development" - not entirely hide them, just note that they're in an
> alpha state and you need to build from source manually. Otherwise people
> try and install them and FAIL.
>
> 2) Show when the egg was last tagged, so people have an idea of age
> (which might imply bit rot)
>
> 3) From each egg, link to some kind of "bugs about this egg" page with a
> link to submit a new bug. Either do this in the existing trac by having
> a dynamic report that picks up tickets tagged "egg-<foo>" and a dynamic
> submit page with "egg-<foo>" already poked into the field (and category
> set to "eggs" or whatnot), or have a dedicated web app (hello, awful!)
> or something. Perhaps let egg authors override the show tickets / submit
> ticket URLs in the metadata file, for us Fossil fans.
>
> 4) Just plain user rankings with a little vote button
>
> 5) Track stats from henrietta: which eggs are downloaded most often?
This all sounds like a lot of work. I had this idea to do some deeper
integration with Ohloh, which keeps track of various things like commit
activity, code-to-comment ratio and such.
Just displaying this info for eggs that are on ohloh would give us a
huge information-boost for little effort, I think. Later we could
integrate deeper, so we can do comparisons between eggs etc.
Writing the actual integration would be more work, as well as actually
ensuring the important eggs end up on ohloh (but ohloh is a big wiki,
so this could be "outsourced" to the community)
Lemme know what y'all think.
Let me give you guys my 2 cents.
We all know it is a wiki and just about anyone can edit. However, a wiki does not by itself encourage contributions. Speaking for myself, I will not edit an egg page unless I am absolutely sure of what I am doing (which, when I'm learning, I'm not). Also, documentation is more formal and requires more thought.
We could just add a way for users to submit notes (maybe with a big ADD NOTE! button visible proeminently on the page). They'd be added in their own section, apart from the author's own documentation and indicating who added that comment (so that we'll know it was not the author himself and take it as a tip and not the canonical source).
Heck, if that's too much work, we could very quickly integrate the wiki with something like
http://disqus.com (at the expense of not storing that information ourselves).
-- Stephen