Please no. Another unmanaged, uncared for wiki is exactly what we don't need.

The maemo.org wiki will be whatever people make it. Personally, I've been trying to tailor articles to present enough information for pretty much anybody to get through the guides while not overwhelming people with lots of excessively detailed steps (too much detail can overwhelm newbies just as quickly as not enough).

I think the article's subject has a lot to do with the ease of the how-to. Dual-booting guides are necessarily harder because the subject is a difficult one. Sure, you could give a copy-paste guide, but what happens when they mess up and get quickly over their heads.

Anyway, striking a balance somewhere between drooling idiot and fairly competent user is something I've been working on with w.m.o with varying success.

I invite anybody interested in helping out to lend a hand. Dismissing it to start something else is wonderful and all, but with a little help we can make it great.

Personally, I'd've rather have seen the Tablet School name leveraged. It's already known and respected, bringing it in under itT proper seems like a reasonable plan, but I suppose you guys have discussed it.

I do fear a Ubuntu forums ending with lots of unanswered threads, though, and I definitely wont be contributing there myself.

Appologies for the ramble, I'm following my family around a Barnes & Nobles in downtown SF. . . .

I agree that the wiki.maemo.org should be the wiki for everything IT and Maemo related. itT's wiki, while it contains a lot of good info and has improved a lot (thanks GA), hopefully would get moved to maemo.org in the future.

One Wiki to bind them all and in the darkness find them. I like that idea, rather than multiple Wikis.

Thru creative nagging, we have achieved discipline here. So if one searches for information, one might well run into the essential thread -- one with more than a hundred messages, replete with false trails and irrelevancies. That's a lot better than having more threads, right?

A good wiki is the answer. And if another site is needed, it seems to me that it already exists -- the Tablet School site.

I've been struggling over the whole "what's easiest for newbies?" question myself.

One of the things that this new site is meant to do is help people find newbie-related stuff, but I wonder if maybe just overhauling this site would accomplish the same thing...?

It seems that one solution would be to rigorously maintain a wiki article that is directly tied to a thread here on ITt (bi-directional links) which distills the wisdom of the thread into an article. But that is a lot of work, and if only one person is maintaining the article, it can be pretty overwhelming...

It would be nice to refine the "thanks" system to rate or classify or tag posts (perhaps a system like on Slashdot?) so you can skim a thread and only read the posts that others found helpful -- but not just a binary system, where it is either "thanked" or "not-thanked", but you can read a thread with your filter set to 3/5, so posts of moderate interest are also shown, not just super-interesting posts...

Off-topic posts and side discussions can be very interesting at the time they are posted, but they make wading through a 100-page thread overwhelming... Sometimes, when someone posts a very technical question to my "easy Debian" thread, I wish I could move the whole conversation somewhere else, or hide it from newbies, or something, thus leaving the original thread "cleaner".

Can I just say to people who think Tablet Scene is a bad idea: ignore it, pretend it's not there. If you don't like it, don't take part. ITT will carry on just as before.

As Reggie says, the idea is to give new and casual users a relaxed place to hang out, and if they want to get a bit more deeply involved in the technology they can easily "graduate" to ITT using the same forum account. If they don't want to get involved in the technology, then ITT isn't the place for them anyway.


It's not direct unfriendliness that's the problem, but people being put off by the heavy technogibberish they see as topic titles in most of the forums.

Look at the General forum for instance, it currently has topics like "Why there is lack of interest Highspeed enabled kernel for the Nokia n800 and n810?", what font is pretty in xterm?, How to partition memory card (Ext2/Fat)?, Lack of Ogg Support etc. These phrases are meaningless to most people, they don't make any sense at all.

If you go to a forum and you can't understand a word of it, you probably won't post or come back at all, because you won't feel it's for you.



There are many ways of doing that, some of them politer than others.

Too often the replies to brand new members say absolutely nothing but "why don't you use the search?" That kind of reply isn't going to make people feel welcome.

For example a reply like this gets across exactly the same information but in a more friendly manner:

"Welcome to the forums! I can't help you with that question myself, but I think there was someone who gave a REALLY good answer to that a while ago. Maybe you could try the search link at the top of the page if you want to look for it?"


The Tablet Scene site is mainly meant for people who buy an internet tablet to use the built-in features, not people who want to do hacks.

The tablets going mainstream means people buying them and using them for the purposes suggested on the box, none of which involve messing around with OSes or application installations.


We did discuss it, but came to the conclusion that it might be best to keep the sites separate for the moment. In the future though, who knows...

I'll be linking to Tablet Scene heavily from ITS in the meantime.


Well, my approach with the Internet Tablet School has taken a totally different route to Wiki, I've deliberately kept a tight rein on what goes in it and how detailed it can be. I received some offers of help (and got an excellent guest tutorial from Thoughtfix) but I generally tried to keep the site in one style with one author.

That's why I mentioned target audiences earlier, I knew from the outset that everything on the ITS would be written for one kind of user. I also had a specific list of topics written down that I worked through until I'd covered all of the features that an average user might want to know about.

If I'd had to cover many kinds of user the ITS site might have become a lot messier and harder to navigate, and the list of topics to cover would have become endless.

The reason ITT is too unfriendly to new users is because the default theme looks like xterm... Seriously, why is the "hacker" forum black, and the "Noob" forum white. Just a little stereotypical, eh?

I have to disagree with some people. Most of the guys here are very helpful, and they give really good step-by-step instructions. Its not a mountain of xterm commands or kernel recompiling, etc.

So, what TS is, in my understanding, is a forum for someone who just wants to use the tablets as advertised. I think its a good idea to split the different types of questions. For example "How do I change my theme" should go into TS, while "How do I change my window manager" should go into ITT. Right?

Video Tutorials are good - @iamthewalrus

Big problem with this is: how can we decide which forum to post to? For example, is bluetooth PAN and DUN questions supposed to go to ITT or TS. Its a questions many people ask, so it is mainstream, but its still a hack. This would really confuse most people (including me).

my bet that anyone posting to this thread probably has enough experience etc to keep any post in iit whereas the newbie should be directed to tabletscene and if he/she graduates to "geek" move on over here- the more the merrier

look- most people want their toys to just work- the refrigerator theory of computing...you plug it in and it works period. that does not describe me or most of the people posting in this thread- but we are in the minority. that is why apple is making as much money as it is now..it just works and windows dont.

if tabletscene helps the majority get their tablets to "just work" then i for 1 welcome it- it means for me continued new nokia toys in the future and continued support

Just my opinion: If someone is willing to put in the effort to start a new website/forum aiming at the newbie crowd, it's definitely worth a shot. There's no reason not to try out new ideas. If it doesn't work, just make the domain resolve to internettablettalk and call it an interesting experiment

Other weird random comments:
- If people are willing to devote time to answering new users, why not try to start an FAQ page on the wiki. Cool rule I use for services I work on: answer it in the FAQ and then send the link, rather than just sending an e-mail/posting/etc. I know it's easier to do for work purposes
- I think the wiki is awesome, esp. for a community effort. Why not try to reorganize the front page, create sections based on difficulty, or at least try to add green/red/yellow image tags to links from the wiki for HowTos to help users get started. Yeah, I'm all talk on this one... I'm glad to have contributed 1 article to the wiki ;-)
- For the new users, I don't think it is rude to provide the general outline of the problem, point to a link, and say "by the way, searching would really help out." Add a smilie if it looks mean.
- Occasional fix-it threads would be great for the community, similar to what the Nokia guys do with maemo.org. "Lets reorg the wiki home page..." "Newby-ize articles" etc

I don't really like forums, but it's the best way to encourage communication. I think leaving technical details in the wiki is the best way to make it easier for all levels of users to get the information they need though

I swear sometimes people can read my mind. Guess what I've been working on for the past few days.

http://www.rit.albany.edu/~ew2193/bookmarklets/

Sometime documentation is much easier done than said and screencasting is great for grabbing the attention of the users.

That screencasting technique is a really cool way to demo a process.

Oh, and those chopsticks for children sure have some lucious colors.