At 9:52p -0700 on 31 Jul 2007, Greg Smith wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Jul 2007, Kevin Hunter wrote:
>> Considering the absolutely ginormous volume of knowledge and the
>> number of _extremely_ intelligent people on this list, I think the
>> problem may be more "instant recall" or ideas than the fact that they
>> have "nothing to write about." Knowing about what to write is
>> generally the crux.
>
> Knowing how to do something and being able to turn that into a written
> article about it are two slightly different skill sets, and you have to
> get both of them in the same person to create such content. It's
> possible to get something workable out of non-writers, but then you need
> to devote substantial editing resources to polishing it and that has its
> own set of issues.
Okay.
> If you take the subset of the community that understands the material,
> then intersect with those who can write, then see who's left you'll find
> a small group of people without much spare time;
Pardon my ignorance, but I don't know who comprises any of those groups:
without naming names, how many writers are you suggesting the community
actually has? I'm not pushing for something that is beginning to sound
like an unfeasible request, especially since I'm not in that small
group, but I am curious
> But writing any one of them takes many hours worth of research, writing
> time, proofreading and testing, and similar work to actually turn into
> something worth making available to the world at large. As was
> mentioned in the discussion about the MySQL comparision piece I've been
> working on recently, a poorly written article can be worse than nothing,
> because it can leave people with a bad taste for some aspect of the
> product or how it's represented that isn't justified.
Fair enough. The quality point is an excellent one, and one that I time
and again appreciate as I read the PostgreSQL lists and use the
PostgreSQL software.
Kevin