Rails documentation - wiki

[Heri_R]

I dont know about you guys but i find the rails wiki and other online
ressources (technoweenie’s website) very hard to find the info i am
looking
from.

I thought they ought to be grouped and categorized. like say you want to
know more about models, there sould be a model category and in this
model
sub categories and then articles/tips/code snippets/error explanations
in
this subcategory.

Take for example wikipedia, imagine if they show their data like they
would
now in wiki.rubyonrails.org it would be completely unusable.

or am i missing something ? how do i guys find the correct info ? say
you
have an error? i find myself googling page after page and tracking down
the
error always takes me too much time.

–
Heri R.
http://sprinj.com

[Heri_R]

I agree with your Heri,
There is alot of useful information out there for rails but finding
things in the wiki is really quite hard.

[Heri_R]

With all of the rails-related (and mostly valid) hype around efficiency
and usability, when I started as a newbee, I chuckled everytime I
visited the wiki. That being said, the caboo.se doc project looks
pretty hot.

Compared with other open source projects, the quantity and quality of
rails information on personal blogs is an amazing phenomenon. I mean,
it’s not a very DRY way to learn a new language/framework, but every
rails newbee by necessity a) improves their google skills, b) knows all
the experienced developers by name and blog theme, and c) has become
convinced one way or another that they should blog about their
experiences. A wonderful thing compared with something like TYPO3
(which I also work with) which has such an (overall) amazing deficiency
of available documentation and yet still has such a loyal userbase.

[Heri_R]

One problem I have with the rails wiki is that sometime it gets
infested with spam. I have to go back in time several revisions to
get what I want and then clean it up. Its annoying. I think there
should be a way to prevent drive-by spamming

[Heri_R]

Sam G wrote:

Its annoying. I think there should be a way
to prevent drive-by spamming

I don’t know if it’s ‘preventable’ without doing damage to the intended
usage. But I have been thinking about the possibility of developing an
administrative capability for Rails wikies that makes it easy to
identify
and remove spam updates. Anybody interested in talking about it?

[Heri_R]

sudara wrote:

Compared with other open source projects, the quantity and quality of
rails information on personal blogs is an amazing phenomenon. I mean,
it’s not a very DRY way to learn a new language/framework, but every
rails newbee by necessity a) improves their google skills, b) knows all
the experienced developers by name and blog theme, and c) has become
convinced one way or another that they should blog about their
experiences. A wonderful thing compared with something like TYPO3
(which I also work with) which has such an (overall) amazing deficiency
of available documentation and yet still has such a loyal userbase.

The great thing about writing a framework like Rails very rapidly is
you save money on professional documentors. The documentation will get
scattered into thousands of Web 2.0 forums and stuff.

But because the root documentation site is a Wiki, y’all could start
fixing it yourself, right? The great thing about naivete is you can add
to the parts that you didn’t understand. You can also transfer anything
you Google for to the wiki. That arranges topics by theme, and improves
the Google pagerank, too.

Finally, I have actually beat a tip or two out of this:

http://www.google.com/codesearch

–
Phlip

[Heri_R]

Phlip wrote:

sudara wrote:

But because the root documentation site is a Wiki, y’all could start
fixing it yourself, right? The great thing about naivete is you can add
to the parts that you didn’t understand. You can also transfer anything
you Google for to the wiki. That arranges topics by theme, and improves
the Google pagerank, too.

Which documentation site are you referring to?

PS. The decision to move the rails list to Google groups was great,
the presentation is so user friendly.

Tony