By wolfraem on

Google's Knol, a service similar to Wikipedia, was announced open yesterday on the Google blog. As the service will undoubtedly draw a number of visitors, I thought it prudent an article on Drupal be established. I've started one, but I have nowhere near enough history with the community to write the article by myself.

I need volunteers to help write/contribute so we can ensure a high-quality reference article on the Google Knol site. If interested, please contact me through the site's contact forum or email wolf.sihart@gmail.com.

Thanks,
wolfraem

Comments

Johnnie Walker’s picture

Johnnie Walker commented

Knol was deprecated a while back but I the concept of a 'unit of knowledge' is something that interests me.

I am a newbie doing a 'survey' of the Drupal docs; I am just, quickly, perusing the docs, page-by-page, to get an overview of its structure so I can work out which bits to read. (As per the 'S' in the reading practice known as SQ3R )

There is a lot of information. Lots duplicated. Lots redundant. It does not 'function' very well.

From my humble first impressions, the documentation books on Drupal.org need some serious 'refactoring' to purge, restructure and de-duplicate the knowledge to make it easier to stay fresh, comprehend and manage.

There are lessons which can be learned from Martin Fowler's Refactoring book. i.e. Look for 'smells', extract blobs of text into neater 'sections' whose name explains the purpose of the section (analogous to Refactoring Methods: "Turn the fragment in to a method whose name explains the purpose of the method"), 'bringing up' duplicated knowledge into 'abstract' pages, or 'bringing down' knowledge into more concrete examples, etc.

This is just a ramble, but I think we could learn lessons from the the art of Refactoring code and also the, defunct, Google Knol project and it's derivatives and am happy to discuss this with those who are more learn-ed in the art of scientific publishing etc.