Re: Tutorial Acceptance Policy

VSarkiss and footpad, thank you for your quick responses! It's great that we have a process for approving tutorials, even if it is semi-formal. I would like to recommend putting a link at the top of the tutorials page with footpad's comments:

Currently, the general process for getting a Tutorial added to the permanent list involves Consideration. Generally, a monk with consideration powers will notice the new tutorial, consider it with a reason similar to "Promote to Tutorials? (Edit eq Yes, Keep eq No)"1 and wait to see what other monks feel about making the new item a permanent part of the tutorials list.

After a decent period of time, e.g. long enough for a janitor to get a sense of how the promotion voting is going, the node will be added to the Tutorials source or removed from Consideration without further action.

It's not a formal review process by any means and, like many other editorial decisions on the site, is based more on the experience of the janitor in question than any hard and fast rule. As with other nodes, we try to err on the side of generosity than elitism. Sometimes, simple mistakes get made.

You do not have to be a high level monk to get a tutorial listed permanently; however, some general advice for all would-be tutorial writers might include:

Make sure your tutorial is well written and clear.

Make sure you choose your examples carefully. They have to be simple enough to grok quickly, but they must be more interesting than "hello, foo."

Write tutorials that include information beyond the friendly manual.

If you must re-write an existing tutorial, then please make sure your final work is clearly needed (e.g. it replaces out-of-date information) or is clearly superior in clarity, coverage, and/or content.

Please do *not* include unnecessary HTML formatting. Case in point, I spent about two hours trying to rewite the formatting of a certain tutorial during the recent revamp primarily because the original author posted an entire HTML document, instead of just the rendered <body> content.

This would, imho, alleviate future confusion. :-)

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hiseldl

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