From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Alex Schroeder Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Emacs, oldsters, newbiness (was: Emacs Wiki Revision History) Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:14:21 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <372adbcc-d97b-453c-8ddc-3a7f1abb0b23@l62g2000hse.googlegroups.com> References: <251d6b72-b760-411b-8c35-83a7788e2491@u75g2000hsf.googlegroups.com> <68deb805-c16f-48ec-96a1-5dd8fd7e5e48@x1g2000prh.googlegroups.com> <56aa1c42-303b-4150-8d96-9159487244e2@40g2000prx.googlegroups.com> <7343b66f-7262-466c-8975-9774dce22d88@y21g2000hsf.googlegroups.com> <7bddb878-9f4c-4140-827c-83cd29c96e5f@l77g2000hse.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1224844909 12239 80.91.229.12 (24 Oct 2008 10:41:49 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2008 10:41:49 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Fri Oct 24 12:42:50 2008 connect(): Connection refused Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1KtK7t-0001dw-CV for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:42:41 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:49410 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1KtK6n-00023N-JC for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Fri, 24 Oct 2008 06:41:33 -0400 Original-Path: news.stanford.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!postnews.google.com!l62g2000hse.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 38 Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 77.56.183.73 Original-X-Trace: posting.google.com 1224843261 32003 127.0.0.1 (24 Oct 2008 10:14:21 GMT) Original-X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Original-NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2008 10:14:21 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: l62g2000hse.googlegroups.com; posting-host=77.56.183.73; posting-account=gsUXzwkAAADKb9uogNWeYQ7wmFQuCBfA User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; de; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092414 Firefox/3.0.3,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Original-Xref: news.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:163780 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:59121 Archived-At: On 24 Okt., 10:31, Paul R wrote: > But making emacs more accessible to the newcomers is a whole project > in itself. Emacswiki, in spite of its relative mess, is clearly a step > in this direction. Though, I'm afraid there is not so much room for > improvement in this area as long as core developers show constant > reluctance to change the defaults of emacs, which are most of this > high, rough, wall. You are right. If you look around Emacs Wiki, you'll notice that there's a set of pages reachable from the SiteMap that is geared towards newbies. It tells them how the wiki works, how to navigate, how to search, how to learn Emacs, and so on. Most of this area is the work of Drew Adams. It is this kind of effort that is required. Thank you, Drew Adams! I hang out on #emacs a lot. Whenever there's an Emacs related question that has no answer on the wiki, I try to write a wiki page instead of just answering it. Or if I cannot I'll give the person whatever help I can and tell them to put the solution on a wiki once they figured it out. Sometimes that works. It's a way of growing the wiki in directions that people actually use. On #emacs, we also have a bot called fsbot, who knows the names of all Emacs Wiki pages, it knows all the names of the manual nodes, and it has a lot of user-level redirections and cross references. Together, fsbot and the wiki make a very impressive team. I guess that Google and the wiki should be equally good, but since I rarely google for my Emacs problems, I can't tell. My point is that looking at the Emcs Wiki on its own might be short- selling it. It often works as a text resource for other services -- web search, IRC bots, and maybe mailing lists and newsgroups. It has been a long time since I posted a lot on gnu.emacs.help... :) Oh and one last thing: Some defaults were in fact changed in Emacs 23. I was confused. But I'm willing to make that sacrifice if it attracts some new users to Emacs. Let's hope we're on the right track.