I was a bit concerned earlier this month when I saw that there was a new vocabulary for tagging docs by audience experience. I should have said something at the time, but now that there's a push on to do a lot of tagging, I'm raising it as an issue and posting it as critical because, if my concerns are valid, it really should be settled before we get too far.
Although it sounds like a good idea on the surface, I strongly feel that this is counterproductive for the following reasons:
- Tags should have some kind of well understood meaning. But "audience experience" is totally ambiguous in respect to both the content and the reader. Nobody can say, or at least agree, where to draw the line between beginner content and intermediate content or between a beginner reader and an intermediate reader.
- Much content is a mix of several levels.
- Trying to sort things by experience doesn't map to the needs of the user. They come to the docs to find out how to do specific tasks, not to work their way through some imaginary progression of learning.
- We shouldn't be confusing documentation with training. They are two separate, but related, animals. It may be useful to tag *tutorials* by audience experience but definitely not the overall docs.
The Audience Type vocab looks pretty much ok to me, although I'm not sure why we break out designers and themers as separate types. Seems to me that design is something that happens totally outside of and separate from Drupal except where it involves theming.
Although it may seem like there's no harm in adding the audience experience tag, I think it will generate a huge amount of busywork, it will create a lot of confusion both for documentation people and the reader and it will add little to no value to the documentation.
Comments
Comment #1
leehunter commentedNo objections?
So I'll go ahead and make these changes?
Comment #2
johnnocNo objections here.
Comment #3
leehunter commentedSo I've removed the "Audience Experience" vocabulary and deleted the "designer" term in the Audience Type vocabulary.
The more I look at the Audience Type vocabulary, however, the more unsure I am about it and the more questions that arise:
We should also have descriptions of these terms so that there's no ambiguity.
Comment #4
MGParisi commentedClosed, No activity and appears to be fixed!