Re: Editor's Guide for new volunteers

Thanks Doug, good observations here.

The two guides intentionally point to each other. In the Getting Started
guide we remind the user to go through registration by referring them to
the Editor's Guide. In the Editor's Guide, we point them to Getting Started
*after* they have run through all the preliminaries. I've changed the
wording in EG Step 3 to remove the "circular reference" effect.

I'm also going through the Editor's Guide to provide links into specific
tasks in the Getting Started guide. See "Step 4: Review existing
content"[1] for an example of how I'm doing this.

Part of the problem with the lists in the Getting Started guide is rooted
in the use of topic flags. There are cases where the page has the wrong
topics, too many topics, or a combination of both. One of the uber tasks,
therefore, is to go through the lists to be sure the pages are properly
topic-tagged. I'd like to make this a task in and of itself, but it's hard
to explain, and we really need to be more cogent on the use of topics and
topic clusters. We've got a start with "Topics and topic clusters"[2], and
to the EG Step 4 page, I appended a "Check the topics and topic
clusters"[3] section.

All of this is the sort of work anyone can do, to help build the Editor's
Guide and the Getting Started Guide. The idea is to present a linear "do
this, then this, then this" path for the user to follow, all the while
cross-referencing between documents to support the user's efforts. To build
out the pages, just put yourself in the user's shoes, as you have been
doing, and fill in the holes as you find them. Note that very often the
content you need to explain something exists (cf. "Check the topics and
topic clusters"[3]) - navigation short-comings notwithstanding, and if you
have any questions, just send a note to public-webplatform.org.

Thanks, Doug, for spotting where we have run astray. Keep looking for stuff
like that, and please don't hesitate to fix it.

~Scott


[1]
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Editors_Guide/step_4_review_existing_content
[2]
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Editors_Guide/step_6_author_or_upload_new_content#Topics_and_topic_clusters
[3]
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Editors_Guide/step_4_review_existing_content#Check_the_topics_and_topic_clusters





On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 5:52 AM, Doug May <intuedge@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi, Julee, Scott.
>
> Just going over this before the sprint, and noticed that we still point
> people to http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Most_Wanted_Tasks (which
> is obsolete, I believe) from
> http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Editors_Guide/step_3_become_familiar_with_the_wiki
> .
>
> Both the Editor's Guide and Getting Started point to each other for where
> to go first for how to get going quickly.
>
> After Scott's careful arguments about why the long, consolidated Getting
> Started page is good, the Editor's Guide seems overly fragmented.
>
> It was still hard to find css stuff to work on.  Most of the stuff listed
> on Getting Started is from apis, except for code samples, and a couple of
> articles flagged for grammar.
>
> DougM
>
>
>