Re: [DIYbio] Return of the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

Thanks for taking the time do mirror this and add some new stuff!

How different is it for newcomers to become a member of diyhpl.us/wiki
than openwetware?

On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 12:01 AM, Bryan Bishop <kanzure@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have updated the DIYbio FAQ, here's the link and the rest of this
> email is more for people who have previously edited the FAQ.
>
> http://diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/faq
>
> @Mac, I think you should add a link to a FAQ on the main diybio.org
> site. This will help people find a biohacker resource almost
> immediately. At the moment, the alternative work flow seems to be
> "find the mailing list, and then type in a question". Beginner
> questions are very important and useful, although I think that people
> could also be served by a link to the FAQ.
>
> Jonathan Cline has done an excellent job with upgrading the FAQ over
> the past few years. We can only hope that he continues to put in such
> regular effort. There has also been a trickle of other contributors to
> the FAQ including: Jonathan Cline, myself, Mac Cowell, Fenn Lipkowitz,
> Nathan McCorkle, Jason Kelly, Jason Bobe, Claes Gustafsson, Markus
> Schmidt, Parijata Mackey, and Patrick McLaren. So, thank you everyone.
> Having said all that, I should probably take most of the
> responsibility for the initial awfulness of the FAQ. It was pretty
> bad! And now it is much less bad.
>
> (By the way, that list was constructed through this method:
> git log --follow diybio/faq.mdwn | grep "^Author: " | sort | uniq
> )
>
> But I also think it has a long way to go. Many of the questions that
> we see on the mailing list don't exactly match up with the questions
> in the FAQ. I uploaded an archive of DIYbio emails from the past few
> years (300 MB ish):
>
> http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/diybio.maildir.tar.gz
>
> It would be an interesting computational project to analyze this text
> corpus and extract actual questions. But it's not as easy as looking
> for interrogatives, since many statements don't have the expected
> punctuation, or sometimes there's a paragraph explaining the setup
> before the question. And, on top of that, it is obscenely easy to
> quickly make a question that will never be asked again by anyone ever
> ("Is it better to use nailclippers or a tree branch to mark 2cm
> grooves in my gel while juggling?"). But many of the basic questions
> are common questions. I don't presently have the patience to fight
> with the nltk package at the moment so I just manually extracted some
> questions from the emails on my own here:
>
> http://diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/faq/better-questions
>
> So I am proposing that we use those questions for informing us as to
> what to write on the FAQ in the future. Most of them are directly
> pulled from emails on the mailing list. You will probably recognize
> your own questions in there if you squint hard enough. Some of these
> are pretty basic, but the current FAQ doesn't answer them. I am also
> interested in alternative ideas for the FAQ.. e.g., maybe something
> involving stackexchange, methodmint, protocols-online, or a web app,
> or something that doesn't involve me writing countless pages of
> unreadable crap.
>
> Why don't the questions currently in the FAQ match up with the trend
> of questions that we observe on the mailing list? One obvious answer
> is that questions in the FAQ are less likely to be asked, therefore
> only new questions would show up in the mailing list. Except that most
> of the questions that we answer on the list are rehashes of the same
> timeless questions since the beginning of DIYbio time. And another
> exception is that newbies are unlikely to find a link to the FAQ
> unless they know to go looking for it, since there's no link on the
> diybio.org page, so they don't have their questions pre-answered for
> them negating that aspect of that explanation. Instead the other
> answer that I offer is that the questions might not genuinely match
> up, so we should rethink what the questions are or populate the
> document with better content. Hopefully the content I have contributed
> in the past week is heading in this direction :-).
>
> Another explanation for the rather small list of editors is possibly
> OpenWetWare's user registration policies. Yes, I know, we talked about
> this before:
>
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/diybio/50U54BYu9Rw/uyOKjBD1xXkJ
>
> But given the lack of editing of the FAQ, I suspect the wiki
> registration barrier might be impeding edits to the FAQ over the past
> few years. I suppose it could also be argued that Jonathan Cline and
> myself are simply at the top of the power law distribution in terms of
> editors, e.g. a small fraction of the total editors will do the
> majority of the authoring or something, but I think the membership
> system only reinforces that by not allowing anyone to edit
> immediately. However, openwetware.org if anything gets high marks for
> serving the iGEM community so well. I am not sure if we are that
> community, and I want to experiment with other tools for collaborating
> anyway. I suspect that nobody is going to be particularly upset about
> me trying out the FAQ on an alternative system, except possibly
> Jonathan who has put more effort into it than I have, although not
> many other people because I can count on my fingers the number of
> editors who did drive-by edits.
>
> So diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/faq is a complete port of the openwetware.org
> DIYbio FAQ to git. This means that you can pull the complete revision
> history and edit files on your computer with this:
>
> git clone git://diyhpl.us/diyhpluswiki.git
>
> historical view and git things:
> http://diyhpl.us/cgit/diyhpluswiki
>
> creating a user account:
> http://diyhpl.us/piny-commands/newuser/
>
> or for those of you who prefer github:
>
> git clone https://github.com/kanzure/diyhpluswiki.git
> http://github.com/kanzure/diyhpluswiki
>
> Note that users who register to edit can edit through the web
> interface, through git on their own desktops (or their own public web
> forks hosting ikiwiki), or they can poke around in the restricted
> shell environment (ssh whateveryourname@diyhpl.us and have fun owning
> my box). You could also hypothetically push a fork on github, and send
> me pull requests or something crazy if you're into that.
>
> I pulled in the full revision history from OpenWetWare, so there's
> nothing lost in terms of historical record. Also, I have pulled in the
> original revision history of the FAQ from my old/dead mediawiki
> instance, so the history is now accurate. For fun you can do this to
> see the history, farther back than openwetware has:
>
> git log --follow diybio/faq.mdwn
>
> OK that's it, let me know what you guys think. Feel free to mess
> around with the other wiki content, some of it is sprawling. As
> always, there is an IRC channel on irc.freenode.net ##hplusroadmap
> which you can access through mibbit.com or irccloud.com, and you can
> find open source hardware projects on /cgit here:
>
> http://diyhpl.us/cgit
>
> - Bryan
> http://heybryan.org/
> 1 512 203 0507
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
> To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>
>



--
Nathan McCorkle
Rochester Institute of Technology
College of Science, Biotechnology/Bioinformatics

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.