Avoiding the docs slide into staleness takes some proactive effort. But a lot of that can be automated these days.

I talk about some suggestions in a blog post here: https://djw.fyi/portfolio/preventing-drift/

#WriteTheDocs #docs #TechnicalWriting #DocOps #LLMOps

I love the idea of multi-item #poll ability in #mastodon. I dived into the API (#rstats rtoot, which is very cool). I can now get statuses, find my polls, and get the stored data.

However, the API doesn't seem to store any kind of ID of the users who voted and how they voted; I thought I'd seen elsewhere that this data could be obtained from public polls, but I don't have it. If I did, I could do two or three one-question polls and then, for users who answered all questions, parse the data into user-matched rows and columns and do fun things like scatterplots, multi-bar charts, regression, t-tests, ANOVA...

but apparently not, because I can't get the data.

If anyone knows of a way a person could get this data (public, ethical, etc.), I'm open to it. Multi-item polls are just such a fun idea.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/polls/#get

#poll #howto #suggestions #docs

Writing is often the smallest part of a tech writer's day. Consider our work as a kind of super QA team and alpha tester that goes beyond making sure the software works as the ticket describes, for example.

Read more:

https://djw.fyi/posts/tech-writer-as-qa/

#techWriting #documentation #writeTheDocs #docs

Federating knowledge: exploring ways to bridge wikis and notes

EDIT: Canceled for the time being, I am sick 😷😭

Join the workshop at #39C3! Day 1, 17:00 @ Free Knowledge Habitat Workshop Area.

Most people and organisations have their very own way of acquiring, organising, archiving, sharing, and collaborating on knowledge repositories. A broad spectrum of opinions and approaches resulted in a diverse and rich ecosystem of knowledge management solutions. Nevertheless, this also implies scattered and disconnected knowledge sources. What would it mean to build bridges among wikis and federate knowledge?

This workshop is going to be heavily centred on a twofold discussion, exploring the challenge of federated knowledge starting from two questions.

• What does it mean to federate knowledge repositories?
• Instead of pursuing a silver-bullet solution to embrace all use-cases, what would it mean to foster and enable interoperability for different software?

These questions stem from years of questioning and wondering how to integrate my personal note-taking and collective, participatory knowledge management at work, in organisations, institutions, and informal collectives. Recently, I began actively researching this topic as I started playing with the MediaWiki API to cross-synchronise my local Markdown notes and the XPUB wiki, the public learning wiki of the Experimental Publishing master. I am puzzled by taking advantage of the potential of a specific software (in this case, MediaWiki) while fearing of being locked-in.

Some further, more specific, insights and questions:

• Local-first approaches and software (e.g. Reflection)
• Interesting experiments based on existing protocols, such as Ibis
• What do we take of semi-open and obscure yet very cool initiatives like Anytype
• The power and the limits of plain-text: how to enable collaboration on simple Markdown files and build on top of it, as Obsidian does

Cc: @modal @p2panda @obsidian @wikimediaDE @dweb

#knowledge #FreeKnowledge #wiki #MediaWiki #API #Obsidian #Anytype #Ibis #IbisWiki #Reflection #CCC #Federation #federatedKnowledge #docs #PKM #knowledgeManagement #personalKnowledgeManagement #collectiveKnowledgeManagement #DWeb #decentralization #ActivityPub

I noticed it because I was in a Zoom meeting that ended before I had a chance to read all the messages in the chat. I remembered being able to read these in the Zoom app (sometimes, but not always?). So, I tried opening the Zoom app. I clicked on the "Docs" tab in the Zoom app not knowing what it was and thinking I could find the chat messages there. I immediately received an email from Zoom advertising the new feature and gushing about its AI slop potential. It was fully enabled by default and very easy to accidentally trigger, as these unwanted features tend to be.

As it happens, I never did find the chat messages. So, the one feature I would have wanted Zoom to add/fix--allowing one to read chat messages after the host hangs up--still seems to be missing or broken. In the meantime they're wasting resources on features I will always disable, cripple, or block.

#zoom #docs #slop #AI #enshittification