This week was uneventful.  Even as I write that, I think of the many things that happened!We had to take Sam (our ginger cat) to the vet this week.  He was very lethargic on Wednesday and Thursday, and by Friday…

Byrne – I am so very pleased to see your comment. On the most immediate level, I’m really happy to see that my comments on MT.org haven’t just disappeared into the ether! I was pretty sure that some benevolent censorship (in a good way) existed to prevent yahoos from making a mess all over the docs. You’re doing a great job – thanks!

I agree that better documentation of the acceptance criteria for user-contributed notes on MT.org (hopefully not a catch-22) is necessary to ensure that neophyte users feel like their contributions matter. Maybe it’s as simple as a frontispiece to the MT.org documentation section explaining the different options available – for example, directing users to continue within the MT.org site for general docs and explaining the contribution scheme therein, to use the forums (if they still exist – I haven’t checked) for more back-and-forth communication, to request support directly from Six Apart in appropriate circumstances, and to contribute to the wiki (or to MT.org) if they desire to improve the offered documentation. As the site currently stands, a brand-new MT4 user wouldn’t have too much of an idea of where to go for these needs without some clear direction.

I would be happy to contribute further to the direction of the MT4 wiki or any other documentation, although I make no claims to be an expert user – that could even be a bonus. Perhaps we should discuss this further? You can reach me at kelly at this domain.

Thank you again for responding to my criticisms in such a constructive manner!

And while we would love the community’s support in making the documentation better, we know that the burden lies upon Six Apart first and foremost to publish good docs and manage the documentation process.

I personally am waiting to see a little bit how things evolve before I start creating too many places to collect knowledge and documentation, which is one of the reasons why the wiki is not heavily promoted yet. I think of the wiki largely as a scratch pad where we collect and gather notes before we codify them into docs.

Not many people are aware, but much of the Administrator’s Guide in MT4′s documentation was written by the community on our wiki. Once we thought we had collected a critical mass of notes we edited and refined that knowledge and published them as documentation.

I personally really like that process – it at least worked for us during the MT4 release.

As for user contributed notes – I do have several thoughts on that I would like to share. I am responsible for moderating, editing and publishing all user contributed notes in our documentation, and it is clear that I have done a poor job of explaining the acceptance criteria for notes.

Documentation quality is very important to me, and I want to make sure that the notes I publish are adding knowledge first and foremost. When a note is a suggestion, feedback of some kind, a correction, or a user looking for support – I typically do not publish the note. I do however read it and take it into account as I write more documentation as I attempt to fill holes, and provide the kind of docs users are looking for

So while I won’t publish every single note for the world to see, I do read and take each one seriously. So I want to thank you for taking the time to leave a note. I did read them, and I hope to respond by providing better and more refined docs in the future.

Finally, Kelly, I want to thank you for bringing a proposal together. We are looking for leaders like yourself to contribute in this way. In fact we need someone who can help shape vision for the MT4 wiki… I don’t suppose that could be you?

Oh, and one last thing. If you are looking for a comment feed template: check out Feed Manager. It’s website makes a template available that you can use.