On 2/4/14, 3:33 PM, Nicholas Nethercote wrote:
On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 2:32 PM, Taras Glek <tg...@mozilla.com> wrote:
A few people noticed that we do not have a nice, searchable knowledge base
for Gecko tech. We have places to ask questions such as various newsgroups,
irc and places to document things like the wikis. It is hard to search
through all of that, so questions get repeated.
Lets give ask.mozilla.org a try. If you see someone asking questions on IRC
or newsgroups, please ask them to write the question on ask.m.o and answer
it there. If the answer is already documented elsewhere, provide a link in
the answer or duplicate it, up to you.
FWIW, Chris Leary started up something very much like this for
SpiderMonkey a couple of years. I can't find it now, and maybe it
doesn't even exist any more. I remember that there was a flurry of
activity at first, but eventually activity died down and it became
moribund.
This tool (or something very similar to it) needs to thrive. From
experience, there are dozens, possibly hundreds of times this tool could
have prevented me from asking an already-been-asked question on IRC or
mailing lists. I can't begin to associate a dollar amount with how
time-consuming reading and responding to these redundant questions is.
Multiply that by 1,000 contributors. By 10,000 (1M Mozillians, right?).
Here is my pledge that I encourage others to adopt:
1) Why asking a question, author the question on ask.mozilla.org and
paste the link (possibly along with minimal context) into IRC.
2) Answer questions on ask.mozilla.org instead of IRC.
3) Encourage others to do the same.
Once we have a knowledge base, we can move on to other rad ideas, such
as cpeterson's: "imagine an askbot-bot that, when it sees questions on
IRC, it searches for likely ask.mozilla.org posts and drops the link in
channel." Yes, please.
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