Re: New LilyPond website

[Graham Percival]

On Sat, Dec 03, 2016 at 11:08:00PM +0100, Simon Albrecht wrote:
> On 03.12.2016 22:35, Graham Percival wrote:
> >A wiki is never the right answer.
> 
> Please elaborate :-) Because it’s too open for everyone to alter?

Because "somebody else" will fix it.  Also, it adds yet one more
place that people are supposed to look at.

We tried two different wikis in the early days of LilyPond; they
were never sufficiently updated to be worthwhile.  LSR was a third
attempt at "handwavy community-edited content", but it was never
the success that the initial proponents suggested.

Diffuse responsibility begs people to think "oh well, somebody
else will do it".  In a project as huge as wikipedia, sure, if
0.0001% of readers get involved, it works.  But even in projects
as big as Debian or Ubutu, a wiki soon becomes riddled with
outdated info.

That's a mistake that the Grand Documentation Project went to
great lengths to avoid.  Individual volunteers took responsibility
for specific portions of the docs; they got the job done, moved on
to another portion, and repeated.  The results are beautiful.
Even the Bug Squad was organized on similar lines.  If we merely
had a pool of 5 people who processed emails, I'm sure it would end
up being a mess.  Instead, each person has a specific day(s), and
that system worked.  (At least for the first few years; not
certain how it's doing now.)

Cheers,
- Graham