[Bf-docboard] Redirecting old 2.3 docs: help needed!

[Kesten Broughton]

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.

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.

I am most interested in documentation related to game engine and physics if
you wish to assign me anything.

kesten

 Dear Search Engine

(Page Rank, QA, QC and Test Engineering Members),


 I am a developer / user / documenter of an open source software tool,
Blender 3D.


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 http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo


 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.


  *Description of the Problem*


 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.


 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.


 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.


 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.)


 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.


 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.


 How do we get the new wiki page rank to trump the old version as soon as
the new one is released?





On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 10:00 PM, mindrones <mindrones at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 11/02/2011 11:54 PM, Raindrops From Sky wrote:
> > Why not simply retire the old pages, rather than this exercise?
>
> Because it would be a waste. We know the link between the pages, not
> informing search engines about it has no sense to me.
>
> The problem is not only removing the old ones, because in some cases we
> also have to climb 4 google pages to be found. Best using everything we
> have at hand IMHO :)
>
>
> > Simply copy the previous content to the latest branch page and add a
> > HatNote (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hatnote) that this
> > content is based on old version x.xx; and may be outdated.
>
> The current wiki started as a transcript of those pages already. After
> so many years (5/6) it has not much sense to do that :)
>
>
> > Another issue is to the Description meta tags are missing in the new
> > pages.
>
> Yeps, this is known, thanks :)
> Will do soon, after moving 2.5 -> 2.6 properly.
>
> Regards,
> Luca
>
> _____________________________
>
> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Mindrones
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-docboard mailing list
> Bf-docboard at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-docboard
>



-- 

Kesten Broughton
President and Technology Director,
Solar Mobile Trailers
kesten at solarmobiletrailers.com
www.sunfarmkitchens.ca <http://www.sunfarmkitchens.ca>
512 701 4209
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-docboard/attachments/20111102/f73f6654/attachment.htm