in reply to Q&A Cleanup -- first five sections
in thread Q&A Cleanup Quest

neshura,

May I add $.02? I think I would keep How can I print a number with a set number of decimal points? and maybe How do I keep anything other than Alpha/Numeric data out of a variable? in the data formatting section.

"How can I print a number..." is certainly related to data formatting. "How do I keep anything..." is just a basic regex question, so that's why I say maybe to it.

In my view, this section is about the concept of formatting data for display, of which the keyword "format" is only a small subset.

:-)

Russ

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Data formatting section in Q&A
by neshura (Chaplain) on May 18, 2000 at 02:10 UTC
    Hmmm...well I'll give you the interest on your $0.02. :-) I'm pretty sure that the latter question will prove more useful if placed in the regex section than in the data formatting section. But you are probably right on the first question -- stuff having to do with printf, sprintf, and format could all go in this area.

    Honestly though, data formatting is itself a bit redundant. If someone has a question like "How do I format a page that I'm printing to a web browser?", does that go under data formatting or CGI? Or both? Actually, (just thinking out loud here), Q&A should have been structured so that each question has one or more keywords/subjects, and then the categories are based on those keywords (with questions appearing under multiple categories)...some of the existing questions ,and also the existing answers, are really cross-category examples...

    e-mail neshura

[reply]
      hehehe Would this be capital gains on the interest from the $.02...? :-)

      You're right about the first question in question. The longer I thought, the less I liked the idea of keeping it in the Data Formatting category. It should go.

      I really like the cross-category thing...
      So many questions apply to more than one category, and allowing questions/answers to span category boundaries would make Q&A a much more helpful place.

      Perhaps vroom would allow some interested and enterprising monk(s) to assist... (Let me know if I can help).

      Russ

[reply]
        I'll make this a more formal public proposal then. I haven't ever looked at the code for this site, but I imagine that this functionality would be relatively easy to implement. (Along with those thousands of other "easy" requests that vroom probably gets every week)

        The idea is to construct the Q&A section from the bottom up rather than the top down. Each question and each answer would contain some additional meta information, namely, a few keywords or key-phrases (like "CGI Programming"). The category list on the front page would then be constructed from the keywords in the database.

        On immediate glance, this seems like a horrible idea -- thousands of stupid keywords cluttering up the Q&A main page, miscategorized questions, question posted to every category. However, I am assuming that vroom is going to go through with the plan to restrict write access to the Q&A section to just a few trusted monks. In this case, a new cross-categorization scheme would have a number of advantages:

        • fewer clicks by initiates and other newbies to get to the right information, hence less frustration
        • good, comprehensive answers that answer more than what was asked could be posted under all the appropriate categories (should threads remain intact everywhere as well? hmmmm...details...)
        • more in the spirit of everything code -- many more cross links as opposed to the current strictly enforced hierarchy in Q&A
        • Q&A would more resemble the cross linked knowledge bases that are actually in use by help desks everywhere

        As far as practical implementation details, I have a few suggestions. Start by giving every existing question and answer a default keyword based on its existing categorization. Once you transition to the trusted-monks plan, give them rights to add/edit keywords. Appoint or get a volunteer with good technical writing/editing skills to keep an eye on the Q&A section structure to make sure it doesn't get unwieldy. I'm sure you'd have no lack of volunteers to do these things (I do it on a volunteer basis for lots of other projects) -- it strikes me that Perl Monks has more monks than it has work to keep them busy.

        Right now, the Q&A section is like a technical book with a table of contents but no index. Information resources like this site need to be optimized for information retrieval. SOPW is optimized by virtue of the vast number of monks just sitting around waiting to be of service. But SOPW is not truly scalable -- the quick question gets the quick answer, and with a great number of questions, wrong answers are going to slip through. In addition, it should be implicit that people RTFM before posting to SOPW. Tutorials are for slow contemplative reading. In contrast, Q&A is part of a gigantic distributed disorganized perl self-help resource, and needs to be usability-optimized for getting the answer to your question as painlessly as possible.

        e-mail neshura

[reply]

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