Just over a month ago, we announced that we opened up editing rights to much of the handbooks for all users on Drupal.org. Our one month trial period is over and the Documentation team has decided that overall it has been a success. We have seen many more edits and fixes in the handbook and, while we did see some limited mess to clean up, occurrences of vandalism (or playing around) were relatively uncommon. We feel, at this time, that open editing is a significant benefit to our handbooks. We have decided to leave open editing in place, with no further defined trial periods. Keep editing away!

In addition to helping out with fixing pages, we also need many eyes on the edits themselves. Anyone can review recent edits and check out the diffs. If you notice something awry about an edit, you can simply fix it by editing or, if you are a member of the documentation team, you can select the "revert" operation from the Revisions tab to undo the change.

This process did raise other discussions related to various improvements we could make to help track edits and thoughts about how the new page creation management, versus editing, could be improved. Feel free to join in those ongoing tasks and discussions. The next IRC meeting will be tomorrow, November 20 at 18:00 GMT (1 p.m. EST, 10 a.m. PST) and all are welcome. For more info on documentation activites and projects, check out our group.

Comments

Rowanw’s picture

I've already noticed various improvements throughout the handbook pages which have been a great help, I'm glad it's staying open.

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Michelle’s picture

Any chance that page could show whether the editor is on the doc team? That would make scanning for edits by non doc team members easier. Always assuming, of course, that doc team members aren't playing around with the handbook pages. ;)

Michelle

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HansBKK’s picture

Michelle’s picture

I'm not talking about badges. I'm talking about the recent edits page. Assuming that's generated from some code, adding in a bit of extra code to put an astrisk by doc team members would help in scanning for edits that need to be checked.

Michelle

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HansBKK’s picture

But I do think such information has value for those reading the content normally as well, if it's not too hard to create a generic solution.

Anonymous’s picture

Great news on keeping the editing open.

Any chance of an RSS feed for the "recent edits" page? That would make the task of reviewing the edits a lot easier for many.

Also how are you creating that recent edits page? Views? Seems like a similar concept to the "Recent Changes" module but done a little differently. Very interested, especially if it's easy to turn on an RSS feed on for it.

Fuzz
http://teamipx.net

HansBKK’s picture

in the meantime give this a try: http://feedity.com/

add1sun’s picture

There is already an issue to provide this. We have two conflicting patches (one to add the feed, one to add paging) so if someone can actually get those into one functioning patch, we can add those features. Check out our issue highlights page if you want to help out.

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matt2000’s picture

Anyone can review recent edits and check out the diffs.

I get an 'access denied' when I try to view a diff. No revisions tab on pages either. Looks like a permission is missing...?

Rowanw’s picture

That happens when the page is new or has no previous revisions.

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seutje’s picture

I knew this would turn out great

haven't had the guts to go edit something myself though, even though I've run into some rather outdated pages on commonly used modules

FiReaNGeL’s picture

I think it would be best for the 'recent edits' page to show each diff directly on the page ala wikipedia - right now its way too easy to deface a page but post a sensible comment about it - do you expect people to check each and every edit each time they open that page?

Aside from that, only good can come out of this :)

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vkr11’s picture

This is the best way to use the community power !!

- Victor
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ericatkins’s picture

Concur.

There's been many times when I've wanted to edit docs...docs that I found via the Google or Drupal search engine.

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3lite’s picture

You can now edit your google search results ;]

Hmmm maybe google and drupal....?

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Dan Saltman’s picture

Great!

I'm really happy about this, you guys def made the correct decision.