Before we get started: Yes, I am well aware that the Mono Project has a limited staff and they are all focused on other things, but to me this point seems very important... (Maybe I'm alone on this one)
The Mono Project is housed at Novell, a large company, and yet to me it has always seemed more like a hobby project. The lack of a respectable wiki and forums makes it seem as though Mono (no matter how great it is) is run out of a kids basement.
A few complaints:
The home page looks like a 1980's VCR with as much stuff packed onto it as possible, whether it is relevant or not. Is information about the Mono 2007 Summit really necessary?
On the home page, the links 'start' and 'contribute' take you to pages that seem to me to have more or less the same information, just split up. Related projects that give great first impressions would be
http://www.opensuse.org/ http://banshee-project.org/ http://www.gtk.org/
It seems like the forums are a compromise between the community who keeps asking for a great forums (based at the mono home site) and the developers who seem to love the mailing lists. It's not secret that http://www.asp.net/ and the msdn forums are heavily used for not just questions but also discussions, which end up being healthy for the community.
The actual 'wiki' part of the wiki is basically non-existent. Very rarely does new content go up and very rarely does obsolete content change. The only way for someone in the community to contribute is to post to the mailing list, which is like throwing a paper airplane into a black hole and hoping it ends up in the newspaper, and submitting an article on codeproject, which seems like a huge pain in the ass (hence this blog). I understand the developers are worried about incorrect or incomplete content being posted but that leaves Nobody contributing.
Maybe a solution would be to create 2 wiki's, one that is accessible to any registered user and another that is accessed only by administrators, and the admins could post good articles from the community wiki to the official wiki. Also, use usernames and tie the wiki into an official forums (real forums, not a list of emails from the mailing list).
These changes along with cleaning up the home page and the content of the wiki can give Mono a more professional look and attitude, which will go a long way towards generating interest and support. The appearance of the mono-project home web site has a strong effect on the project as a whole..
And I know you developers love the mailing lists, but they suck ass.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
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4 comments:
I couldn't agree with this post more. I'm quite new to Mono (and C# in general), but I'm having a tremendously difficult time finding the information that I want. I found this blog from a few posts in the (heinously outdated) forum, and have found it an excellent resource so far. (Keep up the good work!) The Mono project would greatly benefit from a stronger community, better presentation, and more extensive documentation.
I agree for most of it, I really think that letting the community improve the content of the wiki is important, like correcting the dead links. The wiki should show when the information was correct too, for now (most of the time) we don't know what is recent and what might be obsolete.
I'm quite new to Mono, but will dedicate my next 2 month studying it. I already LOVE it, and would be happy to help improve it.
By the way, if someone need some help on a project, especially if it's a cross-platform or a port project, I'm looking for something to work on in order to improve my knowledge on Mono (but can't connect to IRC because of a proxy).
In fact there is a way for the community to participate in the documentation.
First of all, the offline documentation browser has an updload capability which enables users to upload and update the Documentation of the Class library.
And second, the Mono-Wiki really is a mess but it's not dead. If you look at the recent changes then you'll see that there are quite a couple of changes each day! However it is impossible for a few folks to keep that site up-to-date. So please drop a note on the Mono-documentation-list if you see something odd and it'll get fixed right away. New Articles and Tutorials can be submitted as well.
Thank you Valentin for your reply. I don't think the class library documentation was part of the problem. I'm happy to know than we may use the Mono-documentation-list for the Wiki. If I found again some deadlinks I will use it.
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