The other day at the docs office hours, it occured to me that there really is no good way of knowing how documentation you put in the docs wiki is received. I didn't think much more about it then, but the thought has grown and I now think it's a serious problem.
(When I say "feedback" I don't necessarily mean written statements, but also things like usage statistics.)
Feedback serves two really important purposes:
- It's a motivator. When you see that things you created (or participated in creating) are being used, it's encouraging.
- It helps knowing what is wanted/needed. If you see that a lot of people seem to use a stub documentation about writing Views handlers, it probably means that it should be extended.
I'm personally a feedback junkie. I can't resist watching statistics on Google Analytics, see how my tweets are being retweeted or check how many plays my videos get. It's a way for me to feel that the work I'm doing with Drupal (and at other places) is being appreciated.
In the community documentation, the only way of knowing that a page gets attention is if it gets edited. I think more people would get engaged in writing/improving documentation – and keep being engaged – if there was a way to see how much their efforts are being used.
How, then?
An obvious question becomes how to get feedback. Here are a few ideas.
- Make it possible to see how many views a documentation page has. (This requires analytics tools that might be difficult to combine with Varnish)
- Make it possible to see how many views all the documentation pages you've contributed to have, for example as a block on your dashboard. (This requires even more processing than just collecting view statistics.)
- Make it possible to +1 documentation pages.
- Make it possible to see how much +1 the docs pages you've contributed have got.
- Make it possible to see how much +1 the docs pages you've contributed to have got the last day/week/month.
You probably have more ideas, please add them in comments! If we get a lot of them, I think we should start a wiki page.
Site note: There has been some discussion about showing publicly how much "docs karma" a user has. Though I personally find public karma too elitistic, I realize there's a lot of potential in using it.
In this discussion, however, I'd like to discuss feedback as in "giving docs writers information", not discussing how public reputation could encourage contribution.