Quality vs. Quantity (Was: Re: RTFM? IWMITWAFM! (Was: Re: [Zope] WebDAV, Zope, M$ and implications...))

[Howard Hansen]

Excellent point.  People should do what they feel comfortable doing.  If you
want to point someone in the right direction rather than escorting them to
their destination and writing up an account of the journey, more power to
you.

So I think the biggest issue is closing the loop.  The asker asks, the
answerer answers, then the asker closes the loop by reporting back to the
list.  If it makes sense, they should put together a HOWTO on the zope.org
site.

In fact, I've taken the liberty of drafting something that I call the Dieter
Maurer Answer Public License (DMAPL):

The recipient of this terse advice is hereby obligated to close the loop.
This means that if you take the advice and unearth useful URLs or other bits
of information, you are duty-bound to report this information back to the
mailing list, and complete one of the following at Zope.org:

  * Quick summary of the problem and solution (15 min.)
  * Sub-hour HOWTO (<60 min.: example:
http://www.zope.org/Members/howardhansen/debianstartupscript)
  * Full-blown HOWTO (>1 hr.: example:
http://www.zope.org/Members/mcdonc/HowTos/zopeinstall/ZOPE-INSTALL-HOWTO

Of course, there's no reason that one of these loop closers couldn't grow
from a few paragraphs to several pages as time goes by.

And always remember to click on the Catalog tab and get your submission
added to the full-text search.

The Quick Summary will probably take as long to catalog as to write.

The Sub-hour HOWTO might have a structure like this:
  * Overview
    * quick discussion of problem/platform/solution
  * Solution
    * talk about how you made it work
  * Conclusions
    * helpful or related links

The full-blown HOWTO might have a structure like this:
  * Overview
    * talk about who needs to read this
    * list/discuss the techniques used
  * Detailed description of the problem to be solved
  * Assumptions, including, but not limited to:
    * hardware platform
    * operating system
    * software version(s)
    * user experience level
  * Introduction
  * HOWTO
    * Step-by-step with code snippets, screenshots, etc.
  * Conclusions
    * helpful or related links
    * other options

Howard Hansen
http://howard.editthispage.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dieter Maurer" <dieter@handshake.de>
To: "Howard Hansen" <zope@halfmagic.com>
Cc: <zope@zope.org>; <dougie@carnall.org (Douglas Carnall)>
Sent: Sunday, March 10, 2002 10:04 AM
Subject: Re: Quality vs. Quantity (Was: Re: RTFM? IWMITWAFM! (Was: Re:
[Zope] WebDAV, Zope, M$ and implications...))


> Howard Hansen writes:
>  > 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 suggest a different solution:
>
>   I continue to give terse advice and the people with the actual
>   problems write the HowTos after they solved the problems....
>
>
> Dieter