I like the tag idea. But it appears that tags are not versioned (I just tested in the Sandbox). If you tag an XWiki page, and then go back and look at previous versions of that page, they are shown as tagged, even though they weren't tagged at the time they were created. For example, let's say that the current version of the document explaining XWiki permissions is tagged as applying to version-0.9.900. If you view a previous version of the permissions document that was tagged as version-0.9.840, the version-0.9.900 tag appears as well. Not good. Maybe we could use tags for this purpose _if_ when we revise the documentation for a new version of XWiki, we rename existing pages instead of revising them. Is rename functionality planned soon? Thoughts? Stephen
From: Ludovic Dubost <[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [xwiki-dev] This month is DOC month Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 22:50:16 +0200
We could use the tag system for this.. Using tags
version-0.9.840
we could detect tags which start with "version-" and indeed show a "Verified on XWiki version: " text at the end of the page..
Ludovic
[snip]
Since XWiki is constantly evolving, one of the challenges of documenting it is the "moving target" phenomenon. Say you document the XWiki permissions UI. Then a new version is released, and the permissions UI changes. For a time (perhaps a very long time), the documentation is out of sync with the current released version. This will cause end-user confusion and frustration, and it's an example of how out-of-date documentation can be worse than no documentation at all. Other examples include users running old versions of XWiki, looking at a documentation page that describes how a particular feature works in the current released version, and experiencing confusion.
To help address these challenges, I suggest affixing a message at the top of each documentation page, like this:
For XWiki version: 0.9.840+
As new versions of XWiki are released, the documentation team can review each documentation page and determine whether the material is out of date. If the new version differs substantially in its behavior, the message could be changed to:
For XWiki version: 0.9.840 - 0.9.970
where 0.9.970 is the last version that the page accurately documents. This will help readers to know whether the page accurately documents the version of XWiki they're using.
Eventually, the page will be revised to reflect the new functionality, but users running old versions of the XWiki software still need a way to view the documentation for their version. To deal with this, the documentation could provide a link to to the older version of the page. Something like this:
For XWiki version: 0.9.975 See also: <link>XWiki 0.9.840 - 0.9.970</link>
Thoughts?
Stephen