Martin Dougiamas

The combination of those two sentences with "Hence" says that "in general" "people" see "the wiki" as being not valuable. (Right? Tell me if you have some alternate meaning for those words)

and also:

> there are a lot less forum posts (definitely in quality and probably in quantity)

Unless you have analyzed some actual data from across Moodle.org these are not anything like "self-evident truths", they are the opinions of one person. That's why I was agreeing with Chris about the importance of looking at real data.

What I was talking about above in my first post was people READING and searching the docs to find answers, not contributing to them. It seems logical that most of the people who gain satisfaction from them we never hear from, because their question is answered and they move on (think how you use Wikipedia or Youtube).

I think the stats and constant references to Moodle docs through these forums do show a lot of people do use the docs (even via Google, for example), but perhaps an analysis of this (including Moodler interviews and surveys) would make a nice study for some Masters student.

I believe our aim should be to help Moodle users find answers easily in the docs and thus not be forced to wade through fragmented, repeated, outdated and often irrelevant information in the forums.

I'll get back to my work now.

I agree Chris, data is definitely what should be used. I see absolutely no basis for Steve's claims above.

(As an aside PHM membership is now generated directly from posting and rating data: http://moodle.org/user/index.php?id=5&group=1)

There are some stats here that you've probably seen: http://moodle.org/stats One of the interesting numbers there is the new users in the last 24 hours (currently 868 but it fluctuates between 500 and 1500). There are always a lot of new users.

We don't actually know what posting rates are. That's something I can generate from the history - give me some time. And if someone else wants to write a nice forum analysis script I'll be happy to run it here.

One thing we do know about the docs is that server loads on the docs server has gone up and the number of pages has dramatically increased over time. The history for the English docs can be useful: http://docs.moodle.org/en/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&limit=500&days=30 as can the Wiki statistics page: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Special:Statistics (and remember these are just for English).

We do have a distillation process - the docs wiki.

The general idea is to avoid most people ever having to even come to these forums at all (and I'm pretty sure we are already seeing a lot less forum posts because of the docs).

People can click the Docs link at the bottom of the page in their own Moodle where they were having trouble, and they get collected, formatted wisdom in their own language.

I am really have trouble seeing how it's better to have 20 sticky posts at the top of every forum here (with badly written subject lines, offtopic replies and all the rest?). (I am not against the dticky posts feature, I just think it's not as good for the purpose we are talking about).

Some sort of automated FAQ engine is still a possibility, but it would not be a trivial bit of work ... I'd probably rather see effort go into ways to encourage people to contribute to the docs.

It's not something I've ever looked at. What format are they in?

Sorry no, I was referring to file-based sessions. In the database your table would just get longer. No problem.