Yes, I agree that documentation is important both for newbie and knownbie! I can accept that this kind of service is a fee-based service or donation-based service. Suppose it's $5 monthly for subscribing. If there are 100 subscriber, Dieter got $500 monthly. That could be enough for him to get drunken everyday after answered chunks of trivial questions (for him). :-) Of course the side effect is that maybe people will start to expect Dieter to answer all of the questions. It's against the spirit of "mutual help" of Open Source. The opposite side is that peole could also too much rely on the others and didn't try to help themselves. Paradox isn't it? I remembered the time when I keeping asking trivial questions and thanks for many kindly knownbies responsed to me. But I don't think all the questions from newbie should be (can be) answered very precisely . It could be nice if someone (paid or volunteer) can help to do the "documentation" from this list. It could also be nice if someone got the answer from this maillist can contribute to this community again by posting the revised question-answer pair under his/her context. Anyway, I can accept the principle "Pay or Do It Ourselves" Iap, Singuan ----- Original Message ----- From: "Howard Hansen" <zope@halfmagic.com> To: <zope@zope.org>; "Dieter Maurer" <dieter@handshake.de> Cc: <dougie@carnall.org (Douglas Carnall)> Sent: Sunday, March 10, 2002 6:46 AM Subject: Quality vs. Quantity (Was: Re: RTFM? IWMITWAFM! (Was: Re: [Zope] WebDAV, Zope, M$ and implications...))
Dieter, I appreciate all of the work you and the other Zope deities do helping people. Clearly this entails a great deal of time and effort on your part and you probably don't get nearly the recognition you deserve.
From a short-term perspective, it probably makes more sense for you to spend your list-reading hour per day responding to the largest number of requests possible. I don't think that's true from a long-term perspective. In my experience, progressing from Zope newbie to someone who knows just enough about Zope to be dangerous, I've searched many many times for solutions to problems, only to find little squibs of answers saying things like "RTFM about Virtual Host Monsters" or "Download ZPatterns and use that".
I would suggest that you try answering half of the total number of questions, but answer them as fully as you can, assuming that the user knows essentially nothing. Pepper those answers with links, explanations, and philosophical asides. Make it a mini-howto and a seminar on advanced topics in Zope. And be sure to spend exactly the same amount of time, don't add to your burden.
I think the result of this would be that the next time someone has the same question, they'll do a search and be much more likely to find your answer in the archives. If they can't and it ends up on the list, I might just remember your contribution, find it, and point the newbie there myself, while you spend your hour writing up another mini-howto for the ages.
Of course, I could be wrong, but I think it's worth a try!
Howard Hansen http://howard.editthispage.com