[Pydotorg-redesign] What do the other guys do?

[Skip Montanaro]

(changing subject)

Dylan> It doesn't scale well.

This topic of how well the process scales keeps being raised. Does anyone
have round number type figures for how many people are involved (and how
involved) building and maintaining similar sites (php.net, perl.org, tcl.tk,
etc)? If those sites all have a group of maintainers in the < 50 range,
we'd probably be deluding ourselves to think we're going to have many more.

Skip

[Aahz]

Post by Skip Montanaro
(changing subject)
Dylan> It doesn't scale well.
This topic of how well the process scales keeps being raised. Does
anyone have round number type figures for how many people are
involved (and how involved) building and maintaining similar sites
(php.net, perl.org, tcl.tk, etc)? If those sites all have a group of
maintainers in the < 50 range, we'd probably be deluding ourselves to
think we're going to have many more.

Depends whether you add "contributers" to the pool. I don't know if we
can actually do it, but in theory if we're using a real CMS, we can
allow many more people to add content directly to the web site -- it
just doesn't go live until a maintainer approves it.

[Dylan Reinhardt]

Post by Skip Montanaro
(changing subject)
Dylan> It doesn't scale well.
This topic of how well the process scales keeps being raised.

It seems obvious. Of course, it's often the case that the obvious
answer is dead wrong. :-)

It would be interesting to discover whether that intuition is supported
by facts.

Post by Skip Montanaro
Does anyone
have round number type figures for how many people are involved (and how
involved) building and maintaining similar sites (php.net, perl.org, tcl.tk,
etc)?

I'll try to find out those figures for zope.org. I think that's a good
point of comparison for us. Might take a bit, I'll have to get help.

Post by Skip Montanaro
If those sites all have a group of maintainers in the < 50 range,
we'd probably be deluding ourselves to think we're going to have many more.

In a CMS, the real question is how many *contributors* you have. The
number of maintainers is your measure of how *efficiently* contributors
are supported.

Put another way, what is the total number of *participants*? Currently,
at www.python.org, participants and admins are the same people. The
advantage of a CMS is that it lowers the requirements for participation
and (hopefully) raises the incentive to participate.

This is interesting to put in contrast with a wiki, which (IMO) lowers
the requirements too far. Because wikis don't require (or, IMO, value) a
high quality of participation, many potential contributors avoid them.

I'm not arguing against having wikis... if it does the job for you, use
it. But don't look to our wiki usage as any indication of what
participation a CMS would get. I regularly contribute to zope.org's CMS
and the Zope list but wouldn't dream of writing in (or consulting) a
wiki. I know I'm not alone on that.

Dylan