I have brought some diversity of practice to my contributions here and have been chastised for it multiple times. I refuse to conform to the expectations and demands being foisted onto my choices and consider them inappropriate. How is this divers, equitable and inclusive?
My goal in my practices is to improve the quality of the Fedora experience and Linux and FLOSS in general. I have not been soap boxing any of this as I would rather do and not just talk. But it seems some talking is necessary so here goes.
One early, very valuable practice I saw when doing AIX support was the culling of solutions over time. When there was a lull in the call volume some of the more senior engineers would spend time bringing the best solutions together and deleting everything else on the topic. The excellent result was that the next time an analyst searched for information to help a customer, better quality results were returned. When it comes to this Fedora resource there is already quite the volume of bad, obsolete, incorrect information and it has not been around for very long. The pandemic of bad information from AI or any Internet search makes it difficult for users.
When I look at say RedHat and Oracle I see they cull their documentation and knowledebases continually. It is good practice and necessary. The Fedora docs projects are very difficult because updating is hard no matter how necessary. I would love to see AI leveraged to assemble only the best, pertinent and current docs and knowledebase articles together for the actual package set installed.
I have some requests:
Give users the power to set an expiration date on every Topic and Reply they author. It is the author’s property and they should retain the ability to do whatever they want with it.
Give users the power to edit or delete any Topic or Reply they proffered.
Editing or deleting someone else’s contribution would be bad outside a CoC violation or whatever but some kind of default expiration would not. This is not a request just food for thought that seems appropriate to have here.
Make the users who have authority to moderate in any way obvious to every user.
Require users who have authority to moderate/administer abide by the same edicts as every other user.
Deploy an AI mechanism that can be trained by this service’s users to teach it which posts are accurate and helpful. Limit this AI mechanism to just Fedora official packages. Maybe another organization can do the same for all the non-Fedora stuff users ask about here but limit this AI mechanism to Fedora only.
Have an AI mechanism groom all the documentation, both within Fedora and upstream to Fedora, for all packages and make it easy for Fedora users to search on a version/variant basis with all retired versions promptly removed. It would be great for instance if the differences between systemd 256 and 259 procedures were reflected in the AI query results depending on a fc42 or fc44 perspective.
None of these ideas would increase freedom in any meaningful way.
However, they would destroy the purpose of a discussion site.
The forum is not a knowledge base. It is place for discussion of topics related to Fedora. Deleting content from within those topics destroys their usability and makes them useless over time.
I haven’t researched every single section or page in the entire Red Hat Enterprise Linux documentation, so I don’t know for sure if anything has been culled in every new version, but they are all available all the way back to version 4, and as far as I know, nothing has been removed from older versions.
As a Fedora docs contributor, I find working on it neither difficult nor more harder than working on other open source project repos.
This is already available for all (as long as the user has not hidden their public profile).
A simple click on the user name by their post gives immediately their trust level and a second click on that popup info gives more detailed info.
Higher trust levels means more authority/responsibility/ability in managing posts.
Every user on this forum agrees to comply with the CoC when they join and compliance is expected of all.
That is already a given, depending upon the restrictions already in place within the forum software. There are time limits imposed on deleting/editing posts and topics have time limits as well as reply restrictions on deletion (topics replied to cannot be deleted).
It is, however discourteous to others when posts that are replied to are then arbitrarily deleted since that breaks the flow of conversation in the thread and can become very confusing when others are reading the topic.
While you have the right to delete your posts, you should really consider the impact on the overall flow of conversation when doing so, as well as how others perceive your actions.
Information on a public forum becomes public. If you do not wish your thoughts or words to be seen by others then do not post them .
Any part of what you post may become a meaningful part of the discussion and may be quoted by others which then removes that part from your control. If it is meaningful and then leads part of the following discussion the simple act of deleting that post breaks the flow of the following comments.
We all understand the desire for a certain amount of privacy, but there can be no expectation of privacy when your thoughts are posted on a public forum. Tailor what you say in a way that it cannot bring discredit to you and things should be fine with leaving your part of the discussion in the thread.
Automatic expiration would become really really bad for topics that others may find with searches in the future. I will leave it to you to analyze why, based on what was said above.
I agree with this. But I get that culling whole topics could be reasonable and even beneficial. Please don’t mangle the topics by deleting pieces within them though. Maybe moving whole topics to some sort of “archive” category instead of deleting them outright would be preferable if people are worried about losing important historical information? I’d leave the actual deleting/archiving to the moderators. Let the users use the flagging system to notify the moderators that a topic is old, no longer relevant, or inaccurate.
This forums post are a shared community resource and we should implement policy as a community. Improving the quality of the information here needs to be done with the communities wisdom and perspectives being considered. Unilateral actions are unlikely to end up in a share community’s acceptance.
Everyone has their own unique POV on every topic. This is why input from everyone is important and no one should feel their input is not worthwhile. Only by voicing opinions and reasons can others be informed and thus make decisions that are acceptable to the majority.
Nobody wants to seriously use Discourse as a documentation site (except maybe @mattdm), and we’re not going to do that. Also, actively destroying threads of record would ruin the purpose of an asynchronous discussion site.
We have just launched our new Fedora Docs Community Initiative. If you are interested, this could be a great opportunity to help improve Fedora docs. You can learn more about the initiative by reading the latest posts in the Docs Team subcategory.
Remember you are comparing a paid for commercial service with a volunteer supported open source project. It used to be that you could not read the RedHat docs unless you had a RedHat contract.
Discourse is the opposite of documentation. Pages don’t save gracefully, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to search from outside the forum, so if you don’t already know it’s here, it’s effectively invisible.
a quick google search for freedom in the fedora project gives me this topic as the first link, and the next 2 links were also from discourse. Many many other results and several more from this forum were included.
It is very easy to search any terms you wish within discourse from outside.
The title of this topic is “increase freedom”. Yet every single suggestion is about applying a form of control to certain individuals or groups? No thanks.
It is not intended as “documentation”.
It is a forum where a user asks for assistance and with the discussion in that topic a solution is mostly identified. This forum is not a “knowledge base” with the answer for every variant of every problem (with unique hardware and software configs) that every user may encounter. Unlike Windows, or Mac, or Apple, this OS is about freedom and every user has the ability to have different hardware in a unique arrangement, with a unique software config to suit their wants and needs. A “knowledge base” could not possibly address all those variables adequately, but this forum is able to leverage users experience to assist in solutions and in “real time”.
Users with similar symptoms can mostly find a solution if it has already been posted and always are able to ask for assistance if needed.
Well, I’m glad to hear this forum is indeed searchable, but when I’ve gone looking for, say, fedora-specific info, this forum never comes up in the results.
Actually the purpose is to discuss suggestions made in the first post of the topic. Lets stick to that maybe? Just a suggestion, but none that should be discussed here.
Boy do I hate the bigotry in OSS forums… please stick to discussing the suggestions in the first post and not open some random branch discussion about uterly unnecssary things. Sigh.