I really like the reviews section for module reviews. To me it is much better than cpanratings, as it has discussion, which puts a reviewer's comments in context. Cpanratings does not even have the module author's right of reply. I have an issue with this with one of my modules, but I digress.

My issue concerns updating reviews I have written in the past. An extreme hypothetical case is a module which I have written a review of X::Y praising it as the best thing since sliced bread. But I now want to replace it with a review saying that the module X::Y sucks and you should really be using X::Z instead.

I have so far contributed 3 module reviews to PM, and I have updates I would like to apply to all of them. My problem is that I am not sure if I should replace what I wrote previously with a new review, or whether I should leave the original reviews intact, following my own guidelines for updating an existing node.

The first approach leads to something which is more immediately readable to someone using the review as a reference, but much of the discussion is probably no longer relevant as it pertained to the original review.

This brings to mind the fruits of some beer fuelled discussion at a London.pm meet, about two dimensional wikis (this was vapourware, we didn't get as far as turning the idea into code). For each root node in the wiki, one axis is the tree of discussion threads, and the other is the root node's revision history. When going to each revision, appropriate discussion threads would be displayed - appropriate to the particular revision. Being a wiki, the restrictions on who can edit were not applicable (each discussion node would also have a complete revision history).

Whilst I think that the 2D approach is probably not appropriate for PM, I am wondering if there is some way of laying out a review, which does not detract from the clarity, but does not invalidate the prior discussion.

I wonder whether a solution to this this could apply to other sections of the monastery, like the Code Catacombs and Tutorials.

--
I'm Not Just Another Perl Hacker

In reply to Maintaining module reviews by rinceWind

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