On Sunday 05 June 2011 04:20:25 am Frank Lanitz wrote:
On Sat, 04 Jun 2011 17:32:21 -0700 Matthew Brush mbrush@codebrainz.ca wrote:
On a related topic, what if any useful HowTo, explanation, or plugin review that is destined for the newsletter *must* (should) be added to the wiki first. Then the new content from the wiki can be formatted into the newsletter proper (using proper markup, etc), probably having a link/ref back from the newsletter to the wiki. This way, the wiki is always benefiting from the relevant parts of the newsletter and even if reading an old newsletter issue, the current parts can be found on the wiki though links/refs embedded in the newsletter. Another benefit of this is that anyone can potentially contribute stuff to the newsletter without worrying about the markup/presentation of the newsletter. This is best left to specialists, IMO.
Do I understand you correct, that newsletter should work more as some kind of teaser for HowTo articles? Somehow I like that idea.
I like Matthew's idea a lot, but I don't think what he described is quite like a teaser. It is more like the wiki becomes the canonical location for the information disclosed in the newsletter.
When I say it that way, it is more like the newsletter is the teaser for the wiki, but I wouldn't suggest that either.
IMO, the newsletter should contain good, complete (i.e., self-contained) articles on some subject. The article should contain a link to a wiki page that is, at least at one point in time, the text of the article.
Potential newsletter articles might (well, I'd like to say should--there may be exceptions, perhaps due to deadline pressure) be posted on the wiki. Others can review those potential articles and make or suggest improvements in the wiki way.
(There might be a notice on the page saying either that the wiki page is proposed as a newsletter article (by the writer or someone else), or is anticipated to be (i.e., tentatively, at least, accepted as a newsletter article.)
When the article is published in the newsletter, there is a link to the wiki page.
After the newsletter article is posted, the page remains on the wiki and (in the wiki way) is corrected and updated as time goes by. Also, after the article is published in the wiki, a notice is added to the page that says something to the effect that "this wiki page was the basis for the article published in the Geany newsletter of <date> under the title "<title>"".
It might be appropriate to do something like create an additional immutable page to serve as a permanent repository to the article, linked from the mutable page.
(I.e., the link in the newsletter points to a mutable page, the mutable page points to the original text published in the newsletter on an immutable page.)
Randy Kramer