User talk:Ac001

05/2010: Your complaints

Pasting my response now here, because you haven't answered yet:

ac001, without pointing out the obvious: What exactly are you referring to at all (which edits)? I'd be surprised if I should have added anything wrong about git or CVS, having used both systems for a number of years now both privately and professionally, and being quite familiar with their differences, having used CVS for over 10 years now and having in fact contributed to git in the past. I don't think I wrote anywhere that CVS is a distributed SCM (because it clearly is not), if I really did (and you can point me to the corresponding change in the edit history), it was most certainly a typo or a whole number of words missing. So, I would really appreciate it if you could point me to those of my edits that you are referring to, which are in your opinion "idiotic", "silly", "stupid" or just "irrelevant stuff" where I missed to "RTFM". Thank you in advance for actually following up your claims with hard facts. If I did mess up anything somewhere, please do feel free to revert my edits or point me to the corresponding pages, so that I can undo my changes myself, I apologize if that should have really been the case in some of my edits, but given the plethora of edits I have done here, it is of course very well possible that I added inaccurate contents, especially because these are often based on previous discussions which are copy/paste-converted to the wiki format for documentation purposes. However, please also be advised that it is usually easier to get along with people by keeping your tone civilized, it is just not helpful or constructive to yell around if you want to achieve something, even when you are right (but especially not when you are wrong). Thanks for your comments however!--MILSTD 14:16, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Edit, I just took a look at the article that you mentioned, if you take a careful look for yourself, you'll probably see that the offending edit was not done by me: http://wiki.flightgear.org/index.php?title=FlightGear_and_Git&diff=21597&oldid=21533 Can you point me to any other of my edits that you disagree with?--MILSTD 14:21, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Please use the preview button

Hi Ac0001

I do appreciate your additions to our wiki, but please use the preview button next time(s). Every time you save a page, the complete article is stored in the database and your changes are listed in a log. We try to check each edit for (accidental) mistakes/accuracy. So you can help a lot by previewing your edits (and reading them througly) before you save them.

Thanks and kind regards, Gijs 13:35, 4 September 2009 (EDT)

09/2009 - your questions

• As far as I am aware there is -currently- no dedicated place for wiki related TODO items, most of the wiki related issues and feature requests are posted to Talk:Main Page, while general ideas about project related infrastructure enhancements are increasingly collected over at Project Infrastructure Enhancements. Similarly, there's a separate page about volunteering in general: Volunteer and of course that huge monster page named Feature Requests / Proposals / Ideas (which should be cleaned up and pruned eventually. Apart from that, wiki related requests are also occasionally discussed on the FG Devel mailing list. Personally, I think that having a new page specific to TODO items for (and on) the wiki, would be a good thing. So, feel free to start it, possibly by checking some of the other previously mentioned pages for potential items that should be moved to such a new page. If in doubt, make sure to check back with some of the more regular users like User:Gijs. In general, there's of course lots of housekeeping to be done here, see for example the Category:Cleanup, likewise Category:Stubs is another way to find articles that need to be improved. For the time being, I would however recommend to stick to those topics that you are personally interested in, so that you can maintain sufficient motivation.
• you mentioned docs-mini and the lack of source code documentation: for simgear there's doxygen documentation available at www.simgear.org, for FlightGear this can be easily created automatically by using doxygen and running it against the latest CVS checkout, unfortunately this is not yet officially available at flightgear.org (even though this has been suggested and requested numerous times).
• I agree that navigating the wiki (and making this easier) is an important step towards improving usability, the navigation bars added to some categories recently (such as the property tree topics) are an excellent example for this, so I would also suggest to pick other categories and topics that do not yet feature such navigation bars and start creating the corresponding templates (which is mostly a simple copy/paste job, you can easily look at existing templates and customize these accordingly). I am also going to do this increasingly, as well as looking for related articles that should preferably be added to such navigation bars.
• Also, don't be shy about using -and contributing to- the wiki, no matter what people are saying here or for how long they've been seemingly contributing to the project: as long as you contribute anything useful, someone is going to pick it up and put it into better shape at some point, this is how wikis (and open source in general) are supposed to work. And "scratching your own itch" is another very common open source philosophy, so to do what what you are doing right now, i.e. improving the quality of documentation that you are interested in, is the natural way of improving things. If you are unsure about proper naming, specific details or anything else when editing the wiki, you can always get in touch with other users or at least publish/discuss your plans on your own "talk" page, so that other users know about your plans. Also, keep in mind that most articles here had a very simple and humble start in the beginning as well (just look at the edit history of some articles), this applies for example even to pages that have meanwhile become fairly comprehensive and popular, see for example Troubleshooting Problems or Howto: Set up a multiplayer server - both of which also started very simple. Similarly, you can always maintain article-specific TODO items on the corresponding "discussion" page (or its parent category) to help other contributors to get started. Monitoring the mailing lists, as well as the forums, for relevant discussions in order to improve the existing documentation is another excellent way of contributing.
• Finally, don't bother about the "new kid on the block" issue, as long as you are motivated to contribute in one way or another, you should do so - I have personally contributed to this project in various shapes and forms during the last couple of years: patches/code and various forms of community involvement as well as wiki work (not just here, but also back on seedwiki.com where the previous wiki was "hosted" more than 5 years ago) - all of which however doesn't necessarily prevent you from being occasionally treated like the "new kid" by some of the more recent newcomers. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is your contributions. So, welcome on board: Good luck & have fun!--MILSTD 15:02, 11 September 2009 (EDT)