Okay, the other thread has descended into something a bit bitter, so let's cut through all that with a straightforward poll.

If people want to see Tablet School (in its present quality-controlled format) brought back as a section of maemo.org, vote for it.

If people want to see the wiki (i.e. wiki.maemo.org) remain the only source of end user guides, vote for it.

If you want something else, vote for it and post what you want in this thread.

(Note that merging tablet school with the wiki is not an option, so please don't vote for "other" and say you want a merger.)

Why are options one and two mutually exclusive? As I've said before (and will be, evidently, saying again) none of the technical requirements you've outlined are impossible (or, really, even difficult) to implement in the wiki. Yes, if it comes down to it, even the gatekeeping can be provided for.

You'd be willing to switch off the "edit" buttons? And have all tutorials approved by moderators before they are published?

If so, what is the point of using the wiki? What advantage does it offer?

Look, the way things stand, the Downloads page to me looks great. I would love to see Tablet School be laid out exactly like that.

The Wiki page, by contrast, looks awful. I would NOT want to see Tablet School laid out like that.

Could someone explain to me why we couldn't just clone the Downloads section?

There's been talk about what would be possible in theory, but let's look at what actually exists: Downloads looks very user-friendly, wiki does not.

Doesn't it make sense to just use whatever we already have if it works?

Ok, here's what I think. If the school section is something that only a few people should will have back-end access to, I agree it should not be in a wiki -- maybe a blog system that is made to look like the Downloads section.

But if you can see that one of the school's goal down the road is collect information relating to a video (I think this is what you do over at Tablet School), then you should consider the wiki since you will not have time going back to a video that was created five years ago, adding, changing, deleting those extra information in a closed system.

No, I'd be willing to turn off the edit button on the school's index page.

Really, honestly, though, I'm sick and tired of the unending negatative energy directed at the wiki (and, in fact, seemingly everywhere Maemo-related these days) by people who are totally willing to go on endlessly about how crappy and useless it is but totally unwilling to invest the slightest bit of time helping to improve it.

I've said my piece about this for the week. Do what you will.

I never ever said the Wiki was useless, I said it wasn't suitable for beginners.

The maemo.org wiki is obviously a very great resource for people who are experienced users, and wikis in general are extremely useful in that context (we have a behind-the-scenes wiki on All About Symbian to plan upcoming articles).

I'll tell you what I'll do, hopefully this will keep everyone happy:

I'll do a Maemo School on my own on some totally separate site, using videos like ITS. I'll start it when the next Maemo device comes out.

Those videos will be embeddable by anyone who wants to embed them, including maemo.org.

If you want to use my videos in the wiki and add your own text annotations then you'll be able to do that.

End users can then make up their own mind whether they want to access the videos through my site or the maemo.org wiki.

Very happy to have your tutorials resume in one way or another.

This is why I voted for the school section to be seperate from the wiki.

To me, the difference between a wiki audience and newbie/ instructional audience is very large, because by necessity a wiki needs to be informative to a very general crowd and thus a higher level user than a "tablet newbie." No matter how basic its target audience is, in order to remain relevant to its general community, any tablet wiki will eventually get far more technical than a newbie crowd can (or should) be exposed to. You really are talking about two different audiences here, since -- if that wiki is going to be useful to newbie users -- then it will have all the mid- and advanced level information excised and banished to another place.

But that banishing is not what will happen, as mid- and advanced users eventually take things like "become root" for granted and will put that into the newbie wiki, forgetting how "become root" and "red pill mode" sounds like gibberish to a less advanced user/ newbie. So you're talking about two different wikis: a newbie/ instructional wiki and a community information repository wiki. They're not really compatible, especially since everything I've seen referring to the next device(s), Nokia intends for it to be more consumer-polished than the 770 or N8x0s, and so we'll be getting many more community members who have no idea -- and don't care or ever want to know -- what this "root" thing is, never mind knowing the difference between "gainroot vs. become root." This expected wave of willingly-permanently-less-advanced users, (perma-newbies sounds like a slap), will just end up asking in the general forum.

Best stated by mobiledivide in another post:

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...5&postcount=45

These are not stupid people, they just don't know much about the technical guts stuff, have no use for it, and never will. Why make them wade through techno-babble? Should they really be walled off into a section called "newbie wiki" merely because they don't care about linux kernels and gaining root via xterm and omgwhatinheckis red pill mode?

In reference to the suggestion of embedding or linking to instructional vids inside the wiki: merely embedding the videos/ links to into a wiki would just make newbies (or these expected newer/ shallower users) shy away and probably never enter into that part of the wiki which would be most useful for them, since they're wading through "gainroot" vs. "become root" vs. "red pill mode," etc., and because they'd have to wade through a lot of useless (to them) information to get to those video or link to the videos, eventually their eyes will glaze over and they'd just wade to something else, (or ask in the forum for the 1,883rd time).

Putting them in the wiki would, in essence, "hide" the exact help that newbies need.

When I got my tablet, thanks to tabletschool I went from "where's the ON switch?" to full useability (for what I wanted from the tablet at that time), -- and more -- in two days. My linux was rusty and I was able to get over the initial tablet-ownership hump and use the tablet for virtually everything I wanted to do before I had to refresh my linux memory. I remember thinking that this was just the way it should be for every device, and regret now not donating while possible at the time because all the time, thought and work put into that deserves reward. So though this is the wrong place, I'd like to thank Krisse for all the help he or she did me.



Joe

I voted on a separate section within maemo.org because i believe in a completely video based tutorial that is aimed at casual users and moderated by one person (Krisse). Krisse my offer to help shooting and editing videos still stands even if it is on another site.

@GA I have never believed in using the wiki for tutorial purposes so that is why I don't volunteer to help fix it. I think Krisse is offering the best idea and I have sent many confused tablet users to tabletschool.blogspot.com because I know they will understand her videos better than getting information from other places.

As you should know I am a vocal supporter of many things maemo as well as many things Nokia and support and appreciate all of the work you do for the community. Complaining about negative energy (I assume this is focused at me) is not going to guilt anyone into doing anything for you especially when you continue to take such a combative tone. Once again thanks for your contribution Happy Saturday!