[Bf-docboard] Blender.org education/help section

[mindrones]

Hi John!

On 05/15/2011 09:03 AM, John Blain wrote:

> As you may recall from earlier correspondence, I have written a basic
> Blender Manual and have attempted to have a link placed on the Blender
> website. I have also attempted placing a link on the Blender Wiki Page
> and have submitted to Blendernation. All attempts have been to no avail
> and constructive criticism has been minimal . This has not been encouraging.

First off, your book is linked and well exposed in the books section of
the wiki, see:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.5/Books#An_introduction_to_BLENDER_3D_a_book_for_beginners

It's even on top of the list! :)

Searching "blender 2.5 books" Doc:2.5/Books is 4th on that list, so all
in all it's quite easy to get to your book.


That being said, your book is huge and very well written, so I'm glad
that you offered your help :)



> At this stage I am thinking that the existing Blender Education should
> be left in place and perhaps a new 2.5/2.6 Education series should be
> created. There is a huge amount of existing work which, although
> outdated, is extremely useful.


Agree on that, but this is also a huge cause of bad ranking of the wiki.
At some point we should accept that blender 2.3 docs are just old and
let them go.

If you search for "blender documentation", the first link you get is
http://www.blender.org/download/documentation/

My hope is that

www.blender.org/download/documentation/

could be moved to

http://www.blender.org/education-help/documentation/

and cleaned up from those very old links, especially
http://download.blender.org/documentation/htmlI/
and
http://download.blender.org/documentation/htmlII/

For two reasons:

1) these pages, have been mainly ported over the wiki long time ago and
are obsolete

2) *more importantly*, these pages have a better ranking then the wiki
pages (probably because they've been online since the beginning and
because they're pure html)

Some suggestions about these pages:

1) delete them
   this would break the bookmarks all over the world :), OR

2a) add a robots.txt to tell the search engines not to index them
anymore, AND
2b) add a permanent redirect to the correspondant wiki page so that
search engines know that that page is no more but instead the new page
to be shown in search results is the wiki page.

I would love to take the responsability to do (2b), because I know the
wiki structure well.


> Having registered my interest and before accepting any responsibility, I
> would wish to be advised who is the authority for approval and criticism
> of a new Blender Education section. If review is to be made by a
> nebulous body of critics then the path forward could prove to be
> disastrous.


I think it is part of the game and often discussions are a very valuable
help.


> On 15 May 2011 01:30, Ton Roosendaal <ton at blender.org

>     Same goes for the tutorial section;
>     http://www.blender.org/education-help/tutorials/


IMHO the documentation part (including tutorials) should be ported over
the wiki and redirected there from blender.org.


--

I'm not sure I can write actual contents in this period, but I can offer
my help for wiki work.


It is especially important that we eliminate any overlapping contents
blender.org/wiki, because having 2 similar pages from BF competing for
the best ranking isn't very useful and creates confusion while searching.

For any topic that comes to mind, for a certain version of blender,
there should be an unique source of documentation.

For those situations, I'd prefer that we discuss here.



Regards,
Luca

_____________________________

http://www.mindrones.com