Re: postgresql publication - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

On Tue, 31 Jul 2007, Kevin Hunter wrote:

> Considering the absolutely ginormous volume of knowledge and the number
> of _extremely_ intelligent people on this list, I think the problem may
> be more "instant recall" or ideas than the fact that they have "nothing
> to write about."  Knowing about what to write is generally the crux.

Knowing how to do something and being able to turn that into a written
article about it are two slightly different skill sets, and you have to
get both of them in the same person to create such content.  It's possible
to get something workable out of non-writers, but then you need to devote
substantial editing resources to polishing it and that has its own set of
issues.

As the most extreme example, consider how you'd handle an expert who
doesn't have English as their native language.  It's possible for someone
like that to be a great contributor on the coding and mailing lists here,
but you'd be hard pressed to get them to write in an article format.

If you take the subset of the community that understands the material,
then intersect with those who can write, then see who's left you'll find a
small group of people without much spare time; that's the point people
have been making here.  Since high quality technical writing never pays as
much as the same amount of time spent doing straight technical work does
unless you can sell the result to a huge audience (and PostgreSQL doesn't
qualify there yet), it also doesn't make economic sense for many of the
potentially qualified people to even dabble in this area.

> If one is looking for ideas about which to write, it seems to me that
> the fairly active mailing lists would be an excellent thermometer...

Ideas are the easy part; I have a list of >20 ideas for articles about
PostgreSQL that answer the sort of questions that pop up here regularly.
But writing any one of them takes many hours worth of research, writing
time, proofreading and testing, and similar work to actually turn into
something worth making available to the world at large.  As was mentioned
in the discussion about the MySQL comparision piece I've been working on
recently, a poorly written article can be worse than nothing, because it
can leave people with a bad taste for some aspect of the product or how
it's represented that isn't justified.

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