How do you purpose to coordinate the information gathering effort so
people don't waste their time putting the same white paper together 3 or
4 times by accident. Answering the same question over and over again,
etc, etc.

Wiki's are collaboration platforms that are easy to use to input data.
They happen to be easy to use to get data too, but I think you made the
point, Google does that too. The wiki is more important to the
information provider then the consumer. It allows us to build on each
other's knowledge to give a complete picture on a subject matter. From
that respect is does help the consumer of the information too as they
don't have to read 3 different articles threads, blogs, etc. to get the
complete picture.

And there is one available for free from Atlassian to go along with
Jira. That is what we use at my office. (Jira and Confluence).



woodsmailbox wrote:

>
> > The key is the get better information out there and
> > centralization at a wiki level is only one way to accomplish this
> and
> > possibly not the best if we agree that the only user we care about
> is the
> > GoogleBot. No one goes to a website to get information, they just
> ask
> > Google. Increasingly people are realizing that their only real
> customer is
> > Google and this applies even more so to open source projects.
>
> If GoogleBot is your only customer, then it doesn't matter how you
> structure the information, just don't put text in images and don't ask
> for login to reveal info. For this, a static website, wiki, ml, forum,
> online book, etc. is just as good or as bad.
>
> So my problem is exactly the opposite: I'm tired to google around when
> I should just go to a single web page and find it all there.
>
> I'll quickly copy-paste a paragraph from my first message, to re-
> argument this point:
>
> <<So for example, when I want to know about "global temporary tables",
> I go to the section with the same name and I get: documentation,
> supported versions, changelog, implementation notes, user comments,
> examples, support questions and answers, related bugs, architectural
> debate, cross-links to "related" sections etc. In the current state of
> affairs, I'd call that "research".>>
>
> __._,