Re: Rethinking Tutorials

We were in fact considering this exact problem yesterday. While I like your description of it, I don't like your solution. our solution would be as follows:

Tutorials get posted to tutorials, as it should be, the author can pick a tutorial category when posting.
The Tutorials page automagically lists ALL tutorials, according to the picked category, possibly with a section for NEW posts, or some way of identifying them.
Tutorials can be front-paged (I can't see a reason why they shouldn't be.)
Tutorials can be considered to be moved away from that section, and get moved by editors if need be.
Tutorials can also be moved between categories by the editors
Categories would be maintained by the editors, suggestions could be made via /msg editors, Editor Requests or maybe a new page for that purpose.

In my perfect world, also, each tutorial would be maintained by its author, or the editors, a little like Q&A, so corrections and updates would be made as they are needed, keeping teh the tutorial as useful as possile.

Further thought: Each tutorial should also mention which perl versions it applie(s|d) to at time of writing, and which operating systems, if appropriate.

In case you didn't know, the only real problem with the current system is, that Tutorial type nodes have to be added to the Tutorials page by hand. Thus, even if a Meditation gets 'moved' to Tutorials, all that actually happens is that its nodetype gets changed to 'perltutorial', it won't turn up on the Tutorials page unless the editor goes and does that as well. (And I'll admit, I've never added any).

Update: The reason that Meditations that have been considered as 'Move to Tutorials' are getting unconsidered recently, is that we are in general, not moving Meditations to Tutorials any more. This is mostly because quite a few are getting considered that weren't intended as tutorials, and aren't very good as tutorials. (So we need to educate people that intended to write a tutorial, to post them there, even if not quite finished.. It's easy write 'under construction' on a post, and to update one)

Comment on Re: Rethinking Tutorials

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Re^2: Rethinking Tutorials (both) by tye (Sage) on Jan 09, 2005 at 22:44 UTC
I also don't mind if people post nodes to Meditations that are meditative which then result in replies being taken into consideration and an updated version being posted as a Tutorial. While many Meditations are informative and well written, most of them are not tutorials and don't fit in a section called "Tutorials" (where people expect to find material that tutors them, not just every node ever written that is informative). So I think the authors should be moving nodes to Tutorials by republishing them not by having the first draft and a bunch of replies just dumped into the Tutorials section. I'm not a great fan of trashing the careful organization of tutorials to replace it with just listing all tutorial grouped into sections. I think we should keep both, the organized list of tutorials maintained by janitors (and SiteDocClan though I don't think they have access to do so yet) and also plain lists of all tutorials by section and sorted by reputation. The we have the historic problem of a bunch of nodes that are in the Meditations section but are linked to from the Tutorials page. This makes finding such information via Super Search confusing. That is another reason why I like having a first draft in Meditations and, if it is well enough received, have an improved version in Tutorials and, of course, each should end up containing a link to the other. Then people can search for something they remember seeing in Meditations or they can search for Tutorial information. - tye	[reply]
Re^3: Rethinking Tutorials (both) by Qiang (Friar) on Jan 13, 2005 at 07:07 UTC
I like the idea listing all tutorials. Though two version of them, I prefer. One version is the editor approved and official tutorials. the other ones are submitted and not yet approved. these tutorials should be listed in different categories and in an order of the most voted to the least voted (show top 20 then click here to view more kinda way ?). that way, the most helpful tutorials are listed on top and get higher consideration for official tutorial. me and few chinese perl users are setting up similar system and perlmonks is giving me a lot of idea about how to organize the site in order to make it useful.	[reply]
Re^2: Rethinking Tutorials by dbwiz (Curate) on Jan 14, 2005 at 08:24 UTC
Tutorials can be considered to be moved away from that section, and get moved by editors if need be. I believe you mean well by your proposal, but I am afraid that this could be unrealistic. I tested your statement yesterday. I considered this would-be tutorial for moving to Meditations, because it is clear from its reputation (it was negative when I considered) and from the comments added by knowledgeable monks, that the proposal had several serious flaws. There is no consensus in the consideration, though. 6 people voted for keeping it, and the reasons why someone would want to keep a flawed (and possibly misleading) document as a tutorial is really beyond me. I may make some assumptions to explain that. I may assume that people don't bother reading the comments, and from my request it just seemed that I was a snotty SOB who wanted to punish a tutorial that I didn't like. I may assume that people here don't like censoring, and this kind of node moving may sound like censoring, therefore the naturally kind monks voted for keeping. This is just some more food for your thoughts. Please take it into consideration when cooking the final solution.	[reply]


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