I live in austin texas. We have a local google office that does a lot of page rank stuff. I am interested in helping with the migration work you outlined, but I'd also suggest that it might be possible to work with google for a better process for the future.<br>
<br>Here is a letter i started a while back. With your permission, i'd like to persue approaching google to see if they have any workarounds or would like to take this on as a pet research project. Bad page rank for new versions must be a pretty common problem in the open source community.<br>
<br>I am most interested in documentation related to game engine and physics if you wish to assign me anything.<br><br>kesten<br><br>
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<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Dear Search Engine</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">(Page Rank, QA, QC and Test Engineering
Members),</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I am a developer / user / documenter of
an open source software tool, Blender 3D. <br></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Blender 3D is used by tens of thousands
worldwide. It is under rapid development by a large team of coders
and has a substantial communication infrastructure for the community
as can be seen by the master mailing list directory at
<a href="http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo">http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo</a></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">The rapid development poses substantial
problems when it comes to searching for useful information related to
the latest release of Blender 3D. I would like to propose that your
engineering team take on the Blender Documentation Problem as a case
study. This could lead to improvements in search algorithms for
rapid development open source projects and generally for all sorts of
product developers with rapid rollout of new versions.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>Description of the Problem</b></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">The latest release of Blender 3D
includes significant changes to the user interface (UI) and embedded
python scripting API. So much so, that the majority of tutorials and
other documentation for blender no longer work. Blender has a very
large user community with an enormous stockpile of great tutorials
describing all aspects of Blender.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Part of the problem is internal to
Blender. There is a need for a better balance between the coding and
documentation staffing levels. However, I believe that even with
perfect QA and documentation at blender, there would still be several problems related
to page rank at the search engine level. Even when new wiki
documentation is available, it may only turn up on the third page or
worse in a google search.
</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">There is a lag between new
documentation, tutorials etc and the time for page rank to recognize
these documents are far more valuable than the older versions.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Blender has a coding team of more than
20 moving very quickly. Perhaps only 10 of the coders have good
documentation practices. The documentation team is at least one
month behind code release, maybe two. (Blender 2.59 was released Aug
13, 2011. Wiki refererence (incomplete) was added in mid september.
Coding team released 2.60 in late october.)
</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">A small fraction of the user community
is able to run with the coders, and with excellent community forums
and blogs, some information is diseminated in a timely manner.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">The majority of Blender users grow
frustrated. Searching for help on how to use the new lambourguini,
they can only find copies of the yugo user manual.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">How do we get the new wiki page rank to
trump the old version as soon as the new one is released?</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 10:00 PM, mindrones <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mindrones@gmail.com">mindrones@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Hi,<br>
<div class="im"><br>
On 11/02/2011 11:54 PM, Raindrops From Sky wrote:<br>
> Why not simply retire the old pages, rather than this exercise?<br>
<br>
</div>Because it would be a waste. We know the link between the pages, not<br>
informing search engines about it has no sense to me.<br>
<br>
The problem is not only removing the old ones, because in some cases we<br>
also have to climb 4 google pages to be found. Best using everything we<br>
have at hand IMHO :)<br>
<div class="im"><br>
<br>
> Simply copy the previous content to the latest branch page and add a<br>
> HatNote (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hatnote" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hatnote</a>) that this<br>
> content is based on old version x.xx; and may be outdated.<br>
<br>
</div>The current wiki started as a transcript of those pages already. After<br>
so many years (5/6) it has not much sense to do that :)<br>
<div class="im"><br>
<br>
> Another issue is to the Description meta tags are missing in the new<br>
> pages.<br>
<br>
</div>Yeps, this is known, thanks :)<br>
Will do soon, after moving 2.5 -> 2.6 properly.<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
Luca<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Mindrones" target="_blank">http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Mindrones</a><br>
<div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
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</div></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><br>Kesten Broughton<br>President and Technology Director, <br>Solar Mobile Trailers<br><a href="http://www.sunfarmkitchens.ca" target="_blank">kesten@solarmobiletrailers.com<br>
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