Re^2: Rethinking Tutorials

[davido]

In defense of the "The author chose to post to Meditations, let's respect that" attitude, broaden that beyond the simple Tutorials discussion:

• If an author chooses not to use active links when providing a URL, should Janitors linkify the URL?
• If an author chooses not to activate links to POD when mentioned, should Janitors add this functionality to the node in the author's behalf?
• If an author chooses not to pod-linkify instances of Perl function names (eg. chooses not to turn 'print' into [doc://print]), should we be changing that too?
• If an author makes a spelling error in the body of a node, should we fix that for them?
• If an author is a non-english speaker should we repair his grammar to make the node more understandable?
• If we think an author's question or meditation could be worded better, should we change it?
• If an author who has been here at the monastery for several years, and who has participated to the extent that (s)he has become a saint, and that author posts a Meditation, and if that post is clearly ON-TOPIC as a meditation, should we presume to know the author's intent better than (s)he does, and vote to move his/her post into Tutorials?

It is my belief that in most cases, the answer to these questions is no. We shouldn't take it upon ourselves to change nodes unless something is actually broken.

Janitors fix things like formatting, unsearchable titles, profanity, broken tags, broken links, move posts out of sections where they're off-topic, into sections where they're on-topic (eg., from PMDiscussion to SoPW), and this sort of cleanup maintenance. But Janitors don't write nodes for people, fix their spelling and grammar, improve clarity in language, or haphazardly move nodes from one on-topic section to another on-topic section. Janitors don't presume to know better than the author, with respect to content or placement, unless placement of a node is clearly in error. If a well-established monk chooses to post a Meditation, what right do we all have to force it to be a Tutorial instead? And if it was posted as a meditation accidentally, that author can easily /msg the Janitors requesting a move into Tutorials.

Many things can and should simply be accomplished by sending a /msg to an author. In the case of "promote to tutorials", it would be much better for an author to take the content of his/her meditation, and work it themselves, in their own words and style, into a real tutorial, and then post this newly reworked article as a tutoral. If someone's meditation is something that is close to being a great tutorial, /msg the author asking him or her to work it up into one and post it. Many people will respond favorably to such requests.

[diotalevi]

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