PHP Documentation

[Alex Martelli]

Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
   ...
> 2) Many people think that the noise created by lots of user
>     comments would far outweigh the value of the good comments
>     that might be hidden somewhere within.

As long as it's possible to request a view or download of the docs
without the comments, I don't see how this could be a problem -- if you
want to see the docs with comments you can, if not, you're no worse off
than today.  With the kind of threshold-setting and ratings for various
commenters that (e.g.) slashdot uses, you could also set up your
preferences to see _some_ of the comments but not all.

In theory any wiki page could be "defaced" by one nasty minded vandal,
in practice most wikis seem to work decently well -- maybe people react
positively to being trusted.  If comments (and posters thereof,
eventually) can be rated, existing comments edited or removed only by
authorized personnel, etc, etc, I suspect it would work.  No doubt the
needed infrastructure already exists on the widely appreciated PHP doc
pages, it remains to be seen whether we're humble enough to just copy it
wholesale or if the prospect of running PHP code in a key supporting
role for Python is just too embarassing;-).


Alex