Commenting & Discussing Articles

Hi there,

I'd like to suggest to create a possibility to comment on and discuss (technical) articles.

Today I've found a disputable (imho) article on java obfuscation and suggested protection of IP rights on the SDN homepage.

I wanted to comment on it and discuss it with others but unfortunately it was no blog but an article.

Therefore I'd welcome an opportunity to discuss such content too, since I guess we don't want anybody to hide behind a PDF

regards,

anton

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Cant we have something like a Wiki for this so that it can be maintained easily ?

My 0.02

Arun

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The wiki idea

The question is, could all content be in wiki format?

Would a wiki, separated from the actual content with links to content serve.

I think it would....

But is a Wiki the best place to rate, review, critic and discuss an article - especially when that article is sitting outside of the Wiki?

Therein lies a problem, for example in other large Wiki's the content being discussed is right there with it so changes, change histroy, etc is right there with it as well. Disconnect those two items and someone comes in to Comment and they comment on a changed document which no longer has the issue everyone was commenting on. Not so good.

What would perhaps be the best thing is for SDN to focus our energies in getting the "feedback and review" features attached to each piece of content more visible and more usable.

I agree with Craig, "feedback and review" features attached to each piece of content more visible and more usable.....that would be ideal.

But we are speaking of interim solutions, and what we can offer within the bounds of what we have and in the absence of such content-related solutions are:

1) forum threads 2) notes to editor

Hello,

I don't think a wiki would be a solution.

Why does one supply content as a tech article instead of a blog anyway? IMHO it's for one of the following reasons:

- the author is not able to format his/her content in HTML due to lack of knowledge of the latter

- the content itself requires too complex structuring to format it easily in HTML

- the author wants to make existing content available to the SDN audience but doesn't want to invest too much time into reformatting it into a blog and therefore copies and pastes it into a tech article template

each of the points mentioned wouldn't make a difference between a wiki and a blog system.

The sticky thread option mentioned by Marilyn would be an intermediary solution but

- it requires the users good knowledge of the SDN structure so that he knows where to go to discuss the article

- and more important, the very moment this solution would start to work (more articles and more discussion about them) it would fail since then we had various people discussing various articles within one thread - kind of a babylonian situation

IMHO, it might be a solution to (maybe automatically) create a blog containing

- the title of the article

- a reference to its storage

- the usual classification

- and an abstract

Voila, with this provided, we had tech articles as a consistent content embedded into the blog system, with all the benfits like discussing it, having it in the feeds and whatever.

Mabe this raises a little points hunters problem which had to be solved ... argh, we better just forget them

my 0,24578 cents,

anton

Hmmm...I like the way you think Anton.

I would propose bringing this idea to the governance team of SDN (yes there is one for the publishing process).

They could then see what it would mean, in a centralized publishing stream, to provide those details to feed the blog mechanism.

Very interesting idea, actually, as it would provide more exposure for articles and multiple modalities for people to receive them (RSS feeds, etc).

Realistically this would take resources, coding, requests, etc. But we could bring it to governance.

Thanks!

yw.

Btw, I don't think it would require too much efforts,

basically (version 0.4) all you need to do is to force (or kindly ask) people uploading tech articles to fill out the very basic data of a blog form.

<i>Why does one supply content as a tech article instead of a blog anyway? IMHO it's for one of the following reasons:

- the author is not able to format his/her content in HTML due to lack of knowledge of the latter

- the content itself requires too complex structuring to format it easily in HTML

I can give you only one reason for this in my experience. I have done only two technical articles and the reason that I submitted them instead of doing a weblog, is purely because of the amount of screen shots. I didn't think it was a good idea to have 40 screen shots in a weblog. It had nothing to do with the ease of formatting or my abilities in HTML.

Just giving you another perspective.

Regards,

Rich Heilman

Rich,

I didn't want in any way question the authors' choice for a blog or a tech article. I am sorry if you felt kind of offended by my guessing.

All I want is having this kind of content available for discussion in an easy way and as Marilyn noticed to get it the audience it deserves.

regards,

anton

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I'm not offended. Its pretty hard to offend me. Anyway, I was just offering another potenial reason why some go for technical articles rather than weblogs. I do agree with you about having some sort of comments on the technical articles. I for one, would really like to know if the two that I've done are helping people or if they are just causing them problems. One would like to know if one did a good job. Its human nature. Also, having comments on the technical articles would open up another realm of discussion and additional content could then be integrated back into the document(with appropriate mention of contributors, of course). In then end you have a better document for others to learn from.

Regards,

Rich Heilman

Yes but then EVERYONE would have to be a blogger - connecting the two just doesn't seem to be that great an idea.

Anton,

I start to read this thread from top to bottom, and even post my own reply that suggested exactly the same

Funny, that we both came to same possible solution: see my old post

I would say simply go into the Java (or whichever category is pertinent) create a new topic with the link to the article and your comments, then email the author (if possible) to tell them you have made comments on their article and you would appreciate their responsonding.

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Hi Anton,

I understand that frustration. I tried to resolve that as a content strategist with a ".

Alternatively, since this appeared on the Homepage of SDN, you might want to write: a note to the editor at(sdn@sap.com). The editor gets many of these ideas as a result of input from the area content strategists, so a note to the content strategist of the JAVA page would also be helpful (put this in the subject line and send to sdn@sap.com ) Example: A Query for JAVA page content strategist. I think the idea of a thread and public comment is much more effective, personally and I would hate for our tech support to be bombarded with "opinions". Those are better handled publicaly, in forum threads, as Craig suggests.

The real solution would ideally be to have a way to comment directly to the article, but the suggestions above are interim to such capability.

Let me know what you think of the sticky thread idea.

Marilyn

Marylin,

I suggested something more simple some time ago, something that requires certain administrative effort but no development at all.

Think about blog "SDN Articles", every new article has corresponding blog post to this blog. Author is notified via e-mail with permalink. Notification about new articles would be possible via RSS feed. Everyone could post comments and participate in discussion at one single place. Comments are also available via RSS feed. It is better then posting to forum, because later causes flow of e-mails.

And everything is here already. Just create blog.

Valery Silaev

EPAM Systems

http://www.NetWeaverTeam.com

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