Re: PostgreSQL vs. MySQL: fight - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

On Wed, 25 Jul 2007, Dave Page wrote:

> This piece is clearly aimed at end users and shouldn't be on the developers
> Wiki (which is only for internal project documentation/notes). Please move it
> over to techdocs, or refocus it as a guide for use by booth staff etc.

In this document's first six hours of life, I've gotten useful
improvements to it from four people, some of which included material I
wouldn't have found on my own.  I expect that if it's left there, such
useful improvements will continue to flood in for a week or so (trailing
off after everyone has caught up with their e-mail post-OSCON).

The great thing about having a Wiki that many active members of the
community have accounts at is you can create a rough document like this
one and flesh it out as various people add improvements based on their own
expertise.  Since the incremental time needed to improve the document is
low, even the person who only has one small piece to add can do it easily,
and after enough people have passed over it you end up with something no
one person would have come up with on their own.  I've watched some
amazing documents get built this way.

I get that this should go somewhere else eventually.  If you're telling me
the Wiki isn't appropriate even as a staging area for building this sort
of document, which intended to benefit the community as a whole but not
ready to be "published" more formally to something like techdocs, I'll
respect that and nuke it from the developer's area.  But understand that
if you push me there immediately, the whole thing will likely just die
instead.  I personally am not in a position to completely flesh this out
without some help, and I'm not going to put a partially complete article
somewhere else.

As a perfect example of this principle, you're telling me that something
like this might be refocused as a guide for booth staff.  I don't know
what you'd want to meet that requirement--I've never been to your booth.
But looking at what I've done as sort of a prototype, we could have that
discussion now in the context of what would need to be changed to
accomplish that goal.  I've found that people in general are really quite
good at telling you what's wrong with something you've done when you give
them a target to criticize, and you get much better feedback from that
sort of process than happens with a more traditional brainstorming
approach.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD