mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Massimiliano Gubinelli <address@hidden>]

Giovanni,
 well, developers here means me (:)). Again, I'm open to discussion but 
personally I do not think that a wiki in the style of wikipedia will work (it 
is questionable also if it works for wikipedia). In the scientific community 
the accepted way of communicating is via "curated" journals after 
peer-review, and it also seems appropriate to me here. 

There should be someone (the editors) who put her/his "face" in guaranteeing 
that the material is interesting and useful. That is the only reason somebody 
would like to spend time reading it.

If you have ever read places like stack-exchange you would realise that 
sometimes the users suggest to other users wrong methods to solve problems 
and if there is no more knowledgeable people around then these errors sticks 
and are propagated around.

Also the "editors" help the contributors to focus their material and make it 
accessible. TeXmacs is still a small project and I do not think there will be 
problems in filtering the contributions. I see the development of the blog as 
the development of a piece of code, you do not want to develop code in a 
"wiki" style. 

What happens to me often is that a new user want feature X implemented, 
because it exists in software Y, Z or W, without taking time to appreciate 
the internal logic of TeXmacs or the design tradeoffs and motivations. 
Sometimes users think that something can be done in some way, but they do not 
see that there is an easier way. 

Moderation help to remove common misconception. It would also be useful to 
have a page on that: "Common misconceptions of newly arrived users" :)


But again, I think the forum and the mailing list are the right place for 
discussions. The blog is for mature content which should not be difficult to 
moderate efficiently and favour contributions as much as possible.

Max



> On 11. Nov 2020, at 13:56, Giovanni Piredda <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> If a curated blog is the one developers see most fit, then I am going to 
> support it even if my initial preference was for a wiki mostly controlled 
> by the users.
> 
> Still I think that support for exchange of packages and style files among 
> users would be good (strong benefits could come from this). The blog can do 
> it by publishing articles where users describe their own extensions, with a 
> link to a repository, and organizing these articles into collections.
> 
> G.
> 
> 
> Am 11.11.2020 um 09:38 schrieb Massimiliano Gubinelli:
>> Dear all,
>> 
>>  I've added some guidelines for proposing content for the blog 
>> (https://texmacs.github.io/notes/index.html).
>> 
>> You can find them 
>> here:https://texmacs.github.io/notes/editorial-guidelines.html
>> 
>> I tend to think that the correct contribution system is a "curated" one 
>> for many reasons:
>> 
>> 1) technical: the addition have to be post-processes by knowledgeable 
>> people to ensure that the HTML translation is acceptable and nice.
>> 
>> 2) editorial: we want this place to be useful and meaningful. To me the 
>> right approach is to consider it a "publication" where there is somebody 
>> (an editor board) which cares about homogeneity and quality. So a bit of 
>> centralization. This agrees with the fact that TeXmacs itself (i.e. Joris 
>> :)) is very opinionated on design choices and aim.
>> 
>> 3) decentralization: the fact that is a git repository means that it still 
>> remains de-centralized to a large extent: if you want you can clone the 
>> repository and publish the material in **any way** you like. Like software 
>> this material will be open source, for all to use as they see fit.
>> 
>> 
>> I feel that the editorial policy do not restrict your freedom as content 
>> contributor: if you have a github account is very easy to publish your own 
>> better version as "github pages".
>> 
>> Anyway I'm open to discuss it, my intention is that it is 
>> useful/informative/correct/pleasant to read, this should be the primary 
>> goal.
>> 
>> Max
>> 
>>