Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
good chemistry is complicated,
and a little bit messy -LW
 
PerlMonks  

Re: A proposal: new section on Perl Monks.

by rinceWind (Monsignor)
on Feb 27, 2006 at 16:35 UTC ( [id://533067]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to A proposal: new section on Perl Monks.

I don't think that this needs a new section, I think what you are looking for is better indexing and searching on the existing nodes. A single page containing an index of useful snippets would not be particularly useful or maintainable (and would balloon out of all proportion potentially). Something hand-crafted would be guaranteed to be out of date and incomplete. Much better is the output from search or super search.

The Monastery Guidelines go a long way to suggesting how people should make node titles friendly to the search facilities. Granted newbies won't generally reach for search or super search (or Google for that matter), without some prompting.

Maybe integrating the keyword notelet with (super)? search might be a way to start, but there's still the issue of getting people to use it to classify the nodes.

--

Oh Lord, won’t you burn me a Knoppix CD ?
My friends all rate Windows, I must disagree.
Your powers of persuasion will set them all free,
So oh Lord, won’t you burn me a Knoppix CD ?
(Missquoting Janis Joplin)

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: A proposal: new section on Perl Monks.
by madizen (Sexton) on Feb 28, 2006 at 01:14 UTC

    Funny... I'm a little new here and was just reading about how the janitors have to clean up really bad node titles to make them sensible and searchable. Faced with (very roughly) similar issues in handling the differences between what “regular folks” and “professionals” call things in the world of public libraries, we also employ trained database janitors to mind our metadata.

    Perhaps what the OP really wants (better context for programming newbies, is my guess) might best be implemented as a new kind of metadata for all nodes? I'm not suggesting this is needed or easy to do (in fact I know it could come only through considerable ongoing effort), but imagine a clickable thingy other than Reply that would allow privileged monks to add controlled keywords and subject phrases to a node (and perhaps even an abstract) to make it more searchable. Controlled metadata, edited by pros, usually beats the pants off of keyword searching, at least for data sets of nontrivial size.

    Then again perhaps accurate titles and other existing navigational features really are totally sufficient in the PM environment. I'm finding everything that I need, anyway, and the point raised about real newbs not even knowing how to search in the first place is ceratainly valid too. I guess the bottom line in my view is that the ability to ask a monk for help any time day or night pretty much obviates the need to go to great lengths to cater to newbies in the search interface.

Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://533067]
help
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others studying the Monastery: (5)
As of 2024-03-29 10:50 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found