Glossary, Terminology, and Acronyms should be merged

I also think the acronyms page should be included in this merge
http://drupal.org/node/302232

A single source is a better solution. Someone landing on one and not finding the word will assume there isn't a description/definition.

uNeedStuff, I wouldn't do that because it's a subpage of terminology so they are "together".
And they don't have the same goal.

BUT I would like to get the glossary in the terminology page.
Drupal has to much duplicate or almost duplicate pages.

+1 for me

The reason behind why I'm suggesting it is, it gives people a clear place to look up items.
I want to look up the term accessibility. It's a term not a acronym I would goto the Terminology page. Wrong
I want to look up CCK, this is a Acronym I would goto the Acronyms page. Wrong

Right now accessibility is shown on the Acronyms page, this isn't an acronym and is terminology used in both technical terms as well as real world. CCK on the other hand is an acronym, and is currently placed Terminology page.

So how do you decide what goes where? Hence the idea of just putting them all together, one place, no confusion. Need to understand a word or acronym you can find it in one location.

Benefit to merging them would be simplicity in locating a definition when you need one. No confusion as to where you should go to look up a term or acronym.

What is the benefit to keeping them separated?

+1 to combining Terminology, Glossary and the Acronyms page into the Getting Started section. As uNeedStuff says, it's more useful to for a newbie to only have to look in one place!

This has been flagged in the content audit too :)
Also, use the 'Glossary' title.

Resetting component (component spelling changed!)

+1 from me too (on merging with "glossary" as title)

i ll give this a try, but i have some questions first.
the acronyms page http://drupal.org/node/302232 is quite long, though and contains many acronyms and expressions that are not very drupal-specific,

e.g. under the letter N, http://drupal.org/node/302232#n, you find:

na, n/a
1. abbreviation for "not applicable" (for inputs, eg survey forms), "not available" (for outputs, eg database reports). Occasionally seen on Drupal sites where theme functions or expected data for those functions is 'unavailable'. This indicates a small misconfiguration or synchronization problem. Can occasionally be fixed by executing 'update.php'

nod (on)
Lower and raise the head, as to indicate assent or agreement or confirmation; "The teacher nodded when the student gave the right answer". (i.e. express or signify by nodding; "He nodded his approval"). Note: verb: nodding.

neophyte
New member of a community, someone who has not yet been initiated.

newbie
Individual lacking the knowledge of application functions. Someone who has little or no knowledge of computer programs.

newcomer
One who has recently come to a community; a recent arrival; A new participant in some activity; a neophyte.

no-brainer
1. anything that requires little thought. 2. An easy or obvious conclusion, decision, solution, task, etc.; something requiring little or no thought

noob
Newbie, is an online slang term for a newcomer, or someone with little knowledge of a given activity or topic. Sometimes considered disparaging.

novice
Beginner; one who is not very familiar or experienced in a particular subject.

the term "NA", one can argue, is somehow related to drupal. but the rest?

many of the entries are literally copied from wiktionary etc, without bothering of removing the list item number (that is why many definitions start with "1.").

do we really want to add the term "node" between those entries?

shouldnt this acronym list be cleaned up first?

we could add a link to website that explains more general programming terminology

1st part done:

* i added useful bits from the glossary page (http://drupal.org/node/122018) to the terminology page (http://drupal.org/node/937). for more details see the diff http://drupal.org/node/937/revisions/view/1433852/1491348
* renamed "terminology"to "glossary" (http://drupal.org/node/937)
* removed content from glossary (http://drupal.org/node/122018)

to do:

* add some information from old glossary to acronyms list
* compare and merge acronomys (http://drupal.org/node/302232) with glossary (http://drupal.org/node/937)

YESSSSSSSSSSSS :) boris - thanks for helping out, nice to see you again!

i fully agree that anything that is easily found on the regular internet doesn't really need to be in here - if anything is really non-drupal specific, i would vote to leave it out. let's focus on keeping the stuff that really is drupal specific and not easy to find elsewhere.

fixing tag so it stays in lisa's queue

this is getting interesting ;)

most of the "general" entries in the acronyms page date from sep - nov 2008 when an active community member started adding many entries, as can be seen in the revisions http://drupal.org/node/302232/revisions

this all came to a halt after an emotional discussion about the term "cudos": http://drupal.org/node/339398

i hope our changes to these glossary pages wont open up old wounds

Well, now that is some interesting background you dug up!!!

I think it's fine to just go ahead with the effort - the site and community are growing ever bigger all of the time, and I think that it's important we keep focused on Drupal-specific content. Things that can be easily looked up with Google should be fine to leave out.

If any conflict is renewed (which I highly doubt will happen!), I will jump in and mediate, so don't worry about stepping on toes, but thanks for flagging that!

Hi @batigolix, No worries, no emotional discussions will come back at list not from me.

To @ALL:

I started again to contribute a bit on those pages and I am still convinced that a dedicated section for a kind of Drupal Terminology and most used Terms used on Drupal org in Documentation and Forums could support newcomer and all of our members. I am not a coder and nor a developer but I can imagine that further or later there can be a way to learn Drupal having something like a right-click feature for registered and logged-in users so as to have most used Drupal terms and most developer most used Acronyms quickly defined. Who knows.

But AFAIK the Glossary or Terminology or the Acronyms pages are not really popular and visited really, perhaps they are not really promoted or they are not really well organized and edited yet. So I just thought and always do that in general Sites that have a kind of Glossary/Index or alike are taken more seriously and are more enjoyable.

Kind Regards

The update of the glossary & acronyms fits in a larger plan to get the document section of drupal.org back into a decent shape, as it has grown out of hand over the past years. This also should help making it better maintainable in the future.

As a part of the update, I think, the very general terminology and acronyms should be removed. Websites like wiktionary and urbandictionary do a far better job in explaining slang than drupal.org can.

Of other plans, to improve the use and popularity of the glossary pages I am not aware.

I hope to be able to finish merging the pages this weekend. After that we can look in more detail at the glossary list and see if definitions need to be rewritten and such

+1 to get rid of non-Drupal specific terminology ... it's just clutter :)

It's looking good!

Just one comment: you can remove "Alphabet" from http://drupal.org/node/937. And maybe space out those the links and pipes, and make them bigger? The "target" area on a single letter is very small and not-so-good for accurate clicking.

Indeed - looking really good! :D

The 3 pages are merged:
http://drupal.org/node/937

Attached is the list of acronyms that didnt make the cut (html file saved as txt). I'm personally quite sad that i couldnt find a reason to include "YAD" in the new list ;)

Resulting in 2 empty pages with links to the "new" glossary
http://drupal.org/node/302232
http://drupal.org/node/122018

Some small todo's:
* change path of glossary page, it contains the word "terminology" (it is now http://drupal.org/getting-started/before/terminology)
* roll the comments on http://drupal.org/node/302232 and http://drupal.org/node/937 (i do not have the permissions to delete the comment)
* review html code of http://drupal.org/node/937

A big todo:
* revise all entries in glossary for style, up-to-dateness, correctness, typo's (mine)

Do you think a "back to top" link is still necessary in the age of multi-gesture swiping (or whatever they call that stuff)?

The alphabet-navigator was also changed, conform lisarex's request

I think the back to top link is needed. I use it all the time even with my super fast scrolling pointing device.

Awesome!

The small todo's:

* I've updated the url path to http://drupal.org/glossary (YAY!!!!!)
* If you can roll the comments in to the body, I can delete the comments.
* reviewing html ... I ran the page through Total Validator in Firefox (there's a free version). There were 77 errors: (HTML: 25, WCAG v2 A: 51, Link Errors: 1). Some are drupal.org related, but some are in the html. I could send you the report as a zip file (html files plus a CSS file and couple images files)?

I cleaned up a couple of the easy errors but others (such as it's a no-no to put the name attribute on h2) I haven't touched.

The big to-do review could be done at a sprint or maybe we'll just tweet about it w/ a link to an issue where folks can comment on the changes needed (if they aren't comfortable doing changes themselves)

Re: these empty pages, they should be deleted and redirected to the new Glossary, right?

http://drupal.org/node/302232
http://drupal.org/node/122018

1. thanks for the path update! YAD!!

2. I rolled 3 of 4 comments:

* http://drupal.org/glossary#comment-2739496
* http://drupal.org/glossary#comment-3591528
* http://drupal.org/node/302232#comment-3440372

3. I'll validate the HTML myself and fix whatever I can

4. For the big todo: I also think it is not in the scope of this issue to review the complete list. I'll do an attempt, though.

& yes: the 2 pages can be deleted

question: do i open a new issue for the review of the glossary? or do i rename & re-use the exisiting issue?

I've deleted the rolled in comments, the two spare pages, and added redirects from those to http://drupal.org/glossary

YAY!

batigolix, yes, please create a new issue for the review of the glossary. That review can also incorporate the leftover bits that need to be rolled in.

Marking as fixed since the merge is done now.

'ere ye go:

discussion on review of glossary continues:
http://drupal.org/node/1166516

YAD!

Thanks! Also, what is YAD? :)

My goodness, you knocked this one out quickly! Thanks!! :D