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Re^4: Page not found issue while accessing a link from perl monk's tutorial (ownership)

by naikonta (Curate)
on May 10, 2007 at 10:55 UTC ( [id://614599]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re^3: Page not found issue while accessing a link from perl monk's tutorial (ownership)
in thread Page not found issue while accessing a link from perl monk's tutorial

I receive some good impression on what you wrote, tye, as well as what bobf did. I just want to make some notes.
Part of the point of Tutorials is that they are further down the spectrum toward "meant to be perfected" and away from "historical writings owned by their author"
If I'm not mistaken, this sounds contradicted to me. The "meant to be perfected" part can only be read as "the node must be under constant update", at least by me. I can understand that in order to preserve high quality, tutorial documents should be in as finished a state as possible (from tutorial description page). It encourages future authors to prepare the best, check and recheck external links, test and retest code sample, proof-read and reproof-read the textual, and so on. What I don't understand is that the tutorial documents are somehow considered immutable.

While we have a node called How does editing work in the Tutorials section?, its content says nothing about "editing" text per se. Because, pedagogues do not have the power to modify tutorial posts in any way. Fortunately, the node further says, for that, all the standard moderation and consideration procedures apply, so we might still have the chance. Especially because the pmdevils haven't really finished building the section yet so currently they can't do much (from pedagogues node).

To recite what bobf cited from What do Janitors do?:

Janitors are specifically directed not to use their power to fix typos
But a broken link is a kind of special typo, if it *is* a typo. Typos are not the only causes of broken links. As jZed commented in the cb, that it could be that the URL itself changed along the way. Another kind of special typo I can think of is mispelling someone's name, especially if s/he is the one the tutorial authors cite from. Yes, yes, that's what checking and rechecking are for. But it happens that a byte or two just find their way to escape :-)
I'd like to hear whether others feel this is appropriate, especially from those who feel strongly that janitors should not change content
I tend to urge that the janitors remain with their current responsibilities because changing the content of a node (heck, why should there be a node, well a user actually, named node? *sighs*), not to mention tutorials, is a major issue.
Do y'all agree that tutorials should be treated somewhat differently? I still think that significant changes to content (yes, that is somewhat vague, intentionally) should not be made w/o modification of ownership
Well, they *are* treated somewhat differently :-) But yes, I agree. Althought tutorials are *written* by individuals, they are actually *products* of our very own community: PerlMonks. However, I'm not sure about modification of ownership. I know gods and NodeReaper can take over ownerships, but it's a bit awkward for me to apply the same action on tutorials.

So, my point of satements are:

  • Tutorials *content* are not changing whatsoever
  • Broken links are considered as a special case and needed immediate fix upon discovery. The same thing with people's name (somehow Autrijus/Audrey Tang case comes to mind).
  • Pedagogues should have the power to do the fix above (I see bobf, as one of them, is more than ready to carry the mission :-))
  • If a tutorial is considered to be changing for out of date reason, we need a brand new tutorial on top of it, not changing it (due to ownership matters).

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