Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

hacks.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 202 posts

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

#101

Post by kevingadd »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #88

> Better community building: At the moment, MDN content edits are published instantly, and then reverted if they are not suitable. This is really bad for community relations. With a PR model, we can review edits and provide feedback, actually having conversations with contributors, building relationships with them, and helping them learn. This is a longstanding debate in wiki/collaboratively written content, but it i…

I think there's an argument to be made that the impact of temporary errors in an MDN page is more significant than temporary accuracy errors on someone's Wikipedia article. If a developer goes off incorrect information on MDN it can waste days-to-weeks of development effort and potentially lead to defective software in end-users' hands.

To be fair, maybe people should view MDN skeptically just like they do Wikipedia. But I think it's valuable for it to be a reliable source and review-first is a good way to maintain that.

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

#102

Post by setr »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #76
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the problem is that each time the software changes, attributions are lost. I used to be active contributor to MDN with thousands of contributions. Countless hours of volunteer work. When the platform changed and my attributions were lost, I stopped contributing. I had no street cred anymore. I was angry. The switch to GitHub means the same problem once again. Nice way to alienate your community, MDN. Good luck wi…

I don't mean for this to come off rude, but at some point you have to learn that spending time in life on things you don't control can have extremely negative costs. How can you be angry? MDN isn't yours. Do they owe you something? It's volunteer work. You're not owed anything. You should consider attribution a privilege.

That's an absurd take on it... MDN owes this guy nothing, and this guy owes MDN nothing. But attribution, and the volunteer labor, are not part of any financial transaction, so the question of who formally owes who what is entirely irrelevant

But from the social contract, attribution is a perfectly fair expectation for this kind of work -- especially because at the time of, and even going forward, attribution was given. It may not have been codified as a public contract, but the relationship was, and is, quite clear.

And the breaking of that relationship for fairly arbitrary reasons (it couldn't be imported/converted?) is a pretty damn good reason to be annoyed -- hell, what other reason would you consider valid? If it was financial rather than social, you don't get angry, you get even (lawsuit).

Now I'm getting annoyed as I write this; its not a fucking privilege to have been given the honor of doing volunteer labor, and its not a fucking privilege to be given attribution for it -- it's like the most basic free compensation you can give for free work. It's a norm across the board

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

#103

Post by slimsag »

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…

I _wish_ MDN had a user-friendly contribution process. My experience has been _far_ from that. I very much welcome these changes.

In late 2017, I spent upwards of 80+ hours standardizing 80 different MDN docs pages so they used the same best-practices layout as other more popular docs pages on the MDN.[1]

Of the 85 pages I updated to have better formatting, over 18 were reverted by random contributors within 2 days with no reason or explanation in the changelog. It was _impossible_ for me to get in contact with the people reverting the changes, because they are only a username.

I tried contacting MDN maintainers on IRC, searching for those users on IRC, and came up empty handed. I was left to make a plea on the mailing list asking for those change authors to get in contact with me, only to receive no response.

I came away from the experience highly encouraged not to contribute to the MDN.

[1] https://github.com/hexops/vecty/issues/136

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

#104

Post by kardos »

blitblitblit wrote: post #100
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…

> Now users have to learn GitHub and author raw HTML! Ignoring the fact Microsoft's Github has recently had DMCA insanity, a proprietary frontend, and recently enforced Webcomponents (effectively removing UXP devs who were forced to self-host Gitea just to continue working)... this seems like Mozilla is trying to outsource as much as possible from their own hosting. They also shutdown Firefox Send. Perhaps Mozilla is…

> They also shutdown Firefox Send.

IIRC it was being abused and there was no way to combat that

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

#105

Post by feanaro »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #76
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the problem is that each time the software changes, attributions are lost. I used to be active contributor to MDN with thousands of contributions. Countless hours of volunteer work. When the platform changed and my attributions were lost, I stopped contributing. I had no street cred anymore. I was angry. The switch to GitHub means the same problem once again. Nice way to alienate your community, MDN. Good luck wi…

I don't mean for this to come off rude, but at some point you have to learn that spending time in life on things you don't control can have extremely negative costs. How can you be angry? MDN isn't yours. Do they owe you something? It's volunteer work. You're not owed anything. You should consider attribution a privilege.

If he was a contributor, MDN is partly his, in the sense that it can even be anyone's.

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

#106

Post by bawolff »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #76
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the problem is that each time the software changes, attributions are lost. I used to be active contributor to MDN with thousands of contributions. Countless hours of volunteer work. When the platform changed and my attributions were lost, I stopped contributing. I had no street cred anymore. I was angry. The switch to GitHub means the same problem once again. Nice way to alienate your community, MDN. Good luck wi…

I don't mean for this to come off rude, but at some point you have to learn that spending time in life on things you don't control can have extremely negative costs. How can you be angry? MDN isn't yours. Do they owe you something? It's volunteer work. You're not owed anything. You should consider attribution a privilege.

> Do they owe you something

Mozilla is allegedly an open source project, so yes they owe you things based on free software principles, such as attribution and right to fork.

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

#107

Post by bawolff »

MaulingMonkey wrote: post #91
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean for this to come off rude, but at some point you have to learn that spending time in life on things you don't control can have extremely negative costs. How can you be angry? MDN isn't yours. Do they owe you something? It's volunteer work. You're not owed anything. You should consider attribution a privilege.

Attribution is important enough that several software licenses amount to little more than "attribute the original authors and don't sue us." Attribution is important enough that a right of attribution is incorporated into some countries copyright law as "authors rights". Perhaps legally, in this case, they're owed nothing - but it's not unreasonable to consider stripping said attributions to be a dick move, even when…

In some countries you can't even sign away the right to attribution (ianal), so depending on where the contributor resides they might legally owe them that.

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

#108

Post by andylynch »

cxr wrote: post #98
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean for this to come off rude, but at some point you have to learn that spending time in life on things you don't control can have extremely negative costs. How can you be angry? MDN isn't yours. Do they owe you something? It's volunteer work. You're not owed anything. You should consider attribution a privilege.

> MDN isn't yours. Do they owe you something? Yeah, they do owe something: they owe the attribution which is a condition of the Creative Commons license which is what license the content is available to Mozilla (and everyone else) under. > You should consider attribution a privilege. Absolutely not. That's not how copyright works. What a deluded, entitled take.

It’s absolutely a right, and recognised in the Berne convention, although unfortunately not well protected in US law compared to other states.

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

#109

Post by bawolff »

pianoben wrote: post #55
dmos62 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We shouldn't discount volunteer translations. Won't the new platform support that?

I don't doubt that the Github-based CMS will allow for community-provided translations. I _do_ doubt that we'll see anything like the current set of languages covered at anything like the current levels of breadth and quality. Like I said in another comment, approximately nobody translates technical documentation for fun.

A surprising amount of mediawiki documentation is translated by volunteers (i cant speak to the quality as i dont speak nonenglish, realistically the english source material isnt that great) but volunteers do translate things

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

#110

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN