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MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

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Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#151

Post by notriddle »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #126
simonw wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be possible to migrate to GitHub without losing attribution. I've seen scripts in the past that build up a Git repository from scratch, back-dating contributions and crediting them to the author. No idea if MDN are planning to do that though.

Impossible unless you have a thorough map from MDN accounts to Github accounts in advance (because once published the repo can't really change much, especially in this case).

You don't need a map from MDN accounts to GitHub accounts. You just need email addresses.

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#152

Post by simonw »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #126
simonw wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be possible to migrate to GitHub without losing attribution. I've seen scripts in the past that build up a Git repository from scratch, back-dating contributions and crediting them to the author. No idea if MDN are planning to do that though.

Impossible unless you have a thorough map from MDN accounts to Github accounts in advance (because once published the repo can't really change much, especially in this case).

You can use email addresses, but you can also append a profile page URL to the commit message.

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#153

Post by trynewideas »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #140
pianoben wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, absolutely. Approximately nobody translates technical documentation for fun, much less at such a high level. The article is pretty clear that the number of languages supported is a business decision.

Wikimedia/Wikipedia show that people do translate for fun (I do it myself on the wiki software website), so I'm not sure how you have that blindspot. Your comment is the same as people who saw the launch of Wikipedia and wondered who could possibly write articles and find citations for fun. Hell, who would write hundreds of thousands of wiki articles about The Elder Scrolls universe for fun? https://en.uesp.net/wiki/…

> Hell, who would write hundreds of thousands of wiki articles about The Elder Scrolls universe for fun? https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page

70k articles, not hundreds of thousands,[1] and of those 70k fewer than 1/3 are translated to any other language.

And speaking as someone who was a system and content admin for a MediaWiki-powered fiction wiki of about 15k articles... there are not many people relative to the amount of content who are actually interested in contributing anything, much less improving or maintaining what's already there. It's a very, very small core of contributors.

Toward your example, the 161 "active" users[2] (meaning any number of edits in the last 30 days) as of today on English UESP combined for 5,974 edits in that span. Of those edits, 4,779 were from 13 users. 3,039 — more than half of the last month's activity — were from the top 5 users.

On the non-English UESPs? No active users in Portuguese, one in Italian, none in Arabic.[3][4][5]

From my experience at least, it's because it's work — fun work, at times, but still work. Translating MDN content is also work. Doing _any_ documentation of _anything_ is work. Hell, I burned out on fiction documentation work before I burned out on paid work.

Some people do enjoy it! But voluntary documentation is still going to attract a small, specific core group of consistent contributors (if it attracts any at all).

[1] https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:Statistics

[2] https://en.uesp.net/w/index.php?title=Special:ActiveUsers&of...

[3] https://pt.uesp.net/wiki/Especial:Utilizadores_activos

[4] https://it.uesp.net/wiki/Speciale:UtentiAttivi

[5] https://ar.uesp.net/wiki/%D8%AE%D8%A7%D8%B5:%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%...

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#154

Post by boogies »

wldcordeiro wrote: post #146
JeremyBanks wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've chosen to use a web browser that's forked from an old version of Firefox and isn't aiming for compatibility with modern Web Platform Tests, you're going to encounter a lot of obstacles. The fact that you can't see the server-side code generating the failing client-side code, which you can see, seems like the least of them.

Yeah pointing to what is essentially an issue only in a mostly unmaintained version of Firefox is really disingenuous and sounds like someone complaining about something not working on IE6.

Palemoon was last updated ~2,280 times more recently than IE6, and UXP is a Free and open platform used by more than one browser.

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#155

Post by devwastaken »

jameslk wrote: post #112
adamretter wrote: post #85

So, they say that the system is evolving, but from these parts of the article I would argue that the ease of contributing (which is the important part) is taking a massive hit: > "you will no longer be able to click Edit on a page, make and save a change, and have it show up nearly immediately on the page. You’ll also no longer be able to do your edits in a WYSIWYG editor." > "you won’t have a WYSIWYG to instantly se…

> They had a user-friendly system previously... Now users have to learn GitHub and author raw HTML! - I would point out that not all documentation writers are developers! So you'll need to know HTML and how to create a Pull Request on GitHub to be able contribute to documentation about web development... I feel like if you're writing about web development topics, that doesn't seem like a high bar to pass.

Its much more than that. Have you seen how many ways there are to write html? So you have to learn their flavor on top of providing the actual information. Thats a good chunk of time that can be used elsewhere. People don't contribute to projects that have bad levels of entry and artificially difficult participation requirements.

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#156

Post by Aeolun »

wldcordeiro wrote: post #145
hombre_fatal wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, now balance that against the rest of the upsides they present, like the new UX not being to merely revert the changes that you spent the weekend writing. Let's stop acting like just because we can think of one downside that we can ignore the rest of the trade-offs. Btw this is a trade-off they already mentioned in TFA rehashed by an HN comment for some reason.

Because HN commenters always feel like they know better and like to talk down on any changes even when they have no context for why the decision was made.

Or, you know, because it’s a legitimate concern that readers on HN value higher than the MDN maintainers.

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#157

Post by earthboundkid »

ronnier wrote: post #119
jameslk wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They had a user-friendly system previously... Now users have to learn GitHub and author raw HTML! - I would point out that not all documentation writers are developers! So you'll need to know HTML and how to create a Pull Request on GitHub to be able contribute to documentation about web development... I feel like if you're writing about web development topics, that doesn't seem like a high bar to pass.

The friction is higher. Now you have to deal with github and accounts and permissions and so on. Before it was a simple web form.

The friction is lower because I already have a GitHub account but I don’t have an MDN account.

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#158

Post by Aeolun »

nextaccountic wrote: post #62
wffurr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, my internet points!

Those are unpaid volunteers. If Mozilla robs them attribution for work (and yes this is work), then what's left? Specially now that they fired every single paid worker.

> Those are unpaid volunteers. If Mozilla robs them attribution for work (and yes this is work), then what's left?

Warm fuzzy feelings? The knowledge that people read your article thousands of times every day?

Honestly, while I agree that it’s a bit sad to lose the attribution, I find it hard to be sympathetic with people who get salty over losing internet points.

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#159

Post by Aeolun »

pedroma wrote: post #68
wffurr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, my internet points!

I assume they could've put it on their resume and gotten something from that. Now it's just baseless claims.

If your potential employer is so skeptical of you that they don’t trust you when you tell them you wrote certain articles on MDN, they’re not likely to hire you in the first place.

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#160

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

cxr wrote: post #143
crazygringo wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't really know what your first two sentences about human organizations and context are supposed to mean. They're mean that you have completely misinterpreted the conversation, and apparently continue to do so. The discussion started about moral responsibility. You're the only one confusing it with legal responsibility. And that's pretty much that.

You're right, it did start that way. And then the matter of legal responsibility was brought up; one person even posed the question, "Does the project owe its contributors anything?", and gave a direct and unequivocal response: "Legally, no." (Side note: that person was you.) And to say that is to say something that is simply not true—as untrue as any statement now about my being confused about whether legal responsi…

It doesn’t matter. License violations of different kinds are broken all the time and go unenforced due to cost, time, and energy.
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