Re^6: An exegetical guide to the Monastery (cross referencing)

[mr_mischief]

As a man, I take exception to your insistence that XY is a problem. ;-)

I think the real real/perceived issue here is the use of the Monastery. Yes, people do come here to solve specific problems. No, that's not the entirety of the site. The sections which get the most traffic are not "Seekers of Perl Knowledge" and "Cogitations". They are "Seekers of Perl Wisdom" and "Meditations".

missingthepoint is suggesting we quickly shuffle people off to preordained existing nodes without intervention from the monks. The problems with that go deeper than your suggest. That could not just cut down on the discussion or let it get more sloppy, but could kill the discussion in many cases. It could also diminish the chance that a specific caveat or consideration would be delivered from a wise and knowledgeable monk to the person asking the question.

Let's have an example. If I'm using two modules that are known not to play well together, I don't want a tutorial on each. I want to know why and what specific workarounds the monks suggest from their varied experiences. toolic, tye, tilly, planetscape, merlyn, DigitalKitty, BrowserUK, Moriarty, kyle or many other monks might know something quite specific that will help me that's not mentioned in the officially sponsored link.

One of my favorite quotes in any context is from nobull.

Get real! This is a discussion group, not a helpdesk.
You post something, we discuss its implications. If the discussion hap
+pens to answer a question you've asked, that's incidental.

It wasn't said on PM, but on the comp.lang.perl.misc Usenet group. It's a little harsh. PM is traditionally more friendly and more eager to help than c.l.p.misc is. Yet the spirit of the statement is golden. It's great to help answer a specific question, but we're not tutors or consultants in our time here. This is a community site for the benefit of the entire community, and to cut down on the discussion and the depth of the resource in order to quickly answer single specific questions of superficial importance to anyone besides the person asking just seems wrong.

It would be nice to cut down on questions answered well in the manuals, but having clear links to the manuals and site-specific shortcuts to the proper sections of them repeated helps that already. The Tutorials section isn't as well reviewed as we might like, and many of the Tutorials aren't exactly recent. A monk with a high XP level isn't necessarily going to answer a question properly, so giving that person official endorsement of their answer automatically in software seems a little silly.

Update: I fixed a typo in a username and added kyle to my list of helpful monks. Thanks for spotting that, kyle!

[missingthepoint]

I'm well aware you've been here much longer than I, and so I appreciate your thought-out response. Discussion is what I was after - thanks.

I don't disagree with anything you said here. In fact, I now think it is a bad idea, solely for the reason it could kill discussion. For any forum that discusses technology to move towards being less dynamic and active is a bad idea. Perl evolves and grows, so continued discussion will always be important.

broomduster, :) I think a "Roadmap to the Tutorials", or just organising them from basic to advanced, would give much of the benefit I envisioned.