[Zope] Community Glossary

[Loren Stafford]

On sites like www.zope.org, I think there's a need for a what might be
called a "community glossary", which is what you would expect of a glossary,
but has these additional characteristics:

 - Needed terms identified by community.
 - Definitions offered by community.
 - Review process -- there's a possibility for serious misinformation.
 - Individual contributions collected into single glossary view.
 - Searchable, of course, but an exhaustive, alphabetical lookup, not
dependent on quality of a search engine.
 - Possibility of alternative (complementary) definitions of terms by
different community members.
 - Similar to How-To's but tighter in scope of content and method of use.

Why? When a person from one specialized background (Perl/CGI in my case)
dives into the middle of a vast technical project such as Python/Zope, one
of the greatest barriers to entry is the specialized terminology. For
instance, I wanted to understand why my external method doesn't seem to have
certain Zope objects in its namespace. My quest for knowledge let me to the
Digicool papers on Acquisition and Extension Classes, where I ran across
foreign terms such as "mix-in classes" and "Python extension types". Now I
could guess that "extension types" are defined somewhere in the Python
documentation, but I haven't a clue as to where "mix-in classes" comes from.
A glossary -- a good glossary -- one that hyperlinks to the sources of the
definitions -- would be a great help.

I know the next comment will be "We're looking forward to seeing your
forthcoming Community Glossary contributed product for Zope". Well, that
won't happen for months -- not until I get up to speed on Python and Zope. I
mean I still don't know "why my external method doesn't seem to have certain
Zope objects in its namespace".

Anybody else want to run with the idea first?

Comments? Suggestions?

-- Loren