Personal Video Database

How about leveling the playing field and providing others with moderator access so your rants and self indulgent posts can also moderated.

There really is zero chance of rick willingly allowing that to happen.
http://www.videodb.info/forum_en/index.php?topic=1429.0

I do not see much difference between forum and wiki in regard of providing help to the users. Both can be configured to provide similar functionality and it is equally easy to implement links to any of those in the application.

The useful wiki feature for online manual maintenance as I see it are
1) Good page version control tracking who has made changes and easy reversion of changes. This enables liberal delegation of edit rights, encouraging all users to contribute to documentation maintenance. In contrast to a forum where topic header edit rights require administrator privileges which are sensibly only granted to a small fraction of trusted users. The inability to directly fix the documentation without believing knowledge justifies being a moderator and existing administrators agreeing will not increase volunteers to maintain forum documentation.

2) Structures, providing efficient generation of lists / contents. The information content is language independent so only needs to be done once across multiple language versions of the manual

3) Language translation and tracking support is more refined, consistent with the wiki focus on maintaining a reference document vs the forum focus on tracking and storing conversations.

The end result is maintenance of a document in a forum is clearly possible. However it will end up being done by the moderators and in multiple languages. Not a problem for an organisation with a document writer. Also not a problem if nostra, rick and reset are comfortable writing and maintaining it. Or perhaps you are happy with the current level of documentation, noob users support, in which case moving in to the forum environment is probably not to onerous.

Rick has a good point: providing help topics in the forum is definitely less work to do.

Agree administering one site is going to be easier than 2

At the current state of things I would tend to use forum, but naturally, if some has time to provide a well structured wiki page I could reconsider this.

This maybe happening at the moment imo but that is open for debate.

I do not have time to study different wiki engines and such, so maybe I just do not see some kind of easy solution thou. Also, if someone has a step by step instruction of adding wiki functionality to the existing forum engine, then it could be of great help.

From what I have see software tends to do a forum well or do a wiki well but not both (imo). So doing both well would require the user logging into the forum and wiki independently if they wanted to write in either. (And yes I have looked at WikiStyle SMF theme. Similarly SMF Online Manual is OK as a manual and reads as if it was written by a documentation writer with the comments mostly asking for support and being referred to the forum, not suggesting updates to the help pages. This is a perfectly reasonable approach if if one person wants control of the documentation, it is just different to a collaborative document. Interestingly they run two copies of the forum software and require a separate login for each)

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The integration will be limited by having to maintain 2 logins and associated profiles however imo it could be a step in the right direction.

I don't understand this??

In an ideal world we could fully integrate the wiki and the forum.
I think nostra looked at it when the wiki was first proposed and decided the time investment it would take him to move the forum to a platform which supported a wiki would be too demanding on his time. So the wiki was hosted on different software, by a PVD supportive user. (Actually there were separate English and Russian wiki if I remember correctly which were then combined into one.) If this was to be reconsidered I have no idea what software would be used as the forum in tiki wiki looks inferior to what is currently used here.

A way of making the wiki appear to be part of http://www.videodb.info would be to make the home pages identical.
Most of the links on the wiki home page would then direct the user to http://www.videodb.info pages, except of course the wiki tab.
Where this fails though is the logins/registration are separate between the different sites/software.

None the less, a wiki home page which looks and feels similar to http://www.videodb.info/forum_en/index.php and mostly links to www.videodb.info has merit imo from an integration perspective. Nostra would have to not object of course.

The alternative is we just make it as good as we can make it in its own way. Nostra would then be able to later move new useful functionality back here later if he thought some new features had merit.

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I don't entirely agree - i think wiki would be for new users learning about the software, features  what it can do, learning the basics etc. Those who have used it for a while and have questions come here to the forums.

If they are "new users learning about..." then they're users, aren't they? And it's up to them to decide where they want to be. My point is the wiki must not pretend to be a second home for PVD. It's sole purpose is to provide help documentation for users of PVD. Users of PVD don't need a second introduction or sales pitch. Give them what they're looking for—without the bullshit.

A wiki is a community maintained reference document. Ideally suite to cover basic and advance features of software.
Putting various forms of help documentation is sensible. Help documentation would normally start with a program overview so that could be added as well. Basically anything the community could reasonably expect to maintain.

Of course breaking copyright without permission is unwise, especially with nostra.

I've made a few minor changes to the wiki that are, more or less, based on this idea. I put links to "PVD Home" and "PVD Support" at the top of the menu list. I don't care if they stay there, if there's a better way to "integrate" the two sites. I removed a few of the "fluff" features that add nothing to it's main function. I was tempted to remove the forum as well, but editors may want to use that to communicate with one another on wiki matters.

Four links on the wiki home page to http://www.videodb.info/forum_en/ is just silly.

imo we do not need 2 PVD forum. wiki suport can be done here. While it is true the multi lingual support is better with the wiki software that applies to all PVD communication.

BTW, you may want to clarify the likely future of the wiki with nostra before investing a lot of time in it. It's currently running like a ghost ship—hosted by someone we've had no contact with (AFAIK) for over a year. I would want to know what would happen to the wiki if the plug were pulled. I think it would be rather presumptuous to assume nostra would recreate it elsewhere. Aside from finding it ineffective and a PITA to maintain, this is why I was trying to discuss an alternative.

Yep we know you do not like the wiki rick and would like it to die.
However your Integrated Help Forum is not an alternative. Sure it will give the moderators / thread originators power trip but it will do nothing to encourage community participation in the arduous documentation task, and users will be left to wade through crap to find their answers. Forums and wiki have different strengths and weaknesses. They can compliment each other well.

Is there a hit counter on the wiki? Maybe users go there read the content and it is enough for them to do what they want to. Just because it is not updated does not mean its not working. Probably the opposite. If it is getting hits, it probably means the content is good and doesn't need to be updated.

There is a hit counter on each page see the page list

btw I quite like a table of contents which shows most of the available pages, the uniform hierarchy display as shown in the semi automatic contents is also good imo.

Not to say a linked contents could not also be used, I'm just not convinced I would like to use it yet.
Links from each PVD "menu option" / "menu bar option" straight to the relevant wiki page could be good though.

I have thrown together a rough version usinging tikiwiki. (by no means professional but gives an indication of how it could work)
http://www.nimidia.com/pvd_wiki/tiki-index.php?page=UserPagecadishere

imo the content of your home page is better than the existing one so I would be in favour of replacing it with yours. Well done.

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Configuring the wiki (or any alternative wiki) to be "more PVD centric" (whatever that means) does nothing to address the issue.

I disagree. I have had great success with developing a wiki in at work. It does need to be focused on its purpose for existing and needs someone to take ownership and drive it.

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more PVD centric" (whatever that means)

I mean by this, all the crap needs to be removed and content focused on PVD.
IMO -The wiki focus should be more of a Content Management System with wiki features.

+1

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the help file would only contain links from the program hooks to topics in a forum. They would be organized in a hierarchical manner—a table of contents.

I see some flaws here:
* someone needs to maintain the links in the forum
* multiple posts would need to be maintained.
* users would need to wade through multiple posts to fin the information they are after.

Document management is always contentious. No one like writing "how to" doco.
From experience, I think a wiki style system would work. it needs to be focused and have features to do other stuff (like act as a CMS, produce pdfs etc). The forum still exists to discuss and fix etc, but when a solution is found, all the discussion is removed and the core solution is added to the wiki.

+1
Having the primary entry into the wiki pointing to the contents page would go a way to fixing the current one. Better still if a search box was added to it.

The Forum is the best way of exploring new or difficult issues. It is easiest to create as it is just a record of conversations by those who choose to converse that way.

A wiki produces a more readable reference document. Enabling new users to go straight to the current preferred answer on documented subjects and anyone who feels the current documentation could be improved can directly fix it. It does however require a conscious effort to contribute to PVD documentation and some effort to maintain the structure / contents page.

A help index goes some way to bridging the gap but is not as good (from a readers perspective) as a wiki table of contents and the referenced forum threads are not as good as an equivalent wiki page.

So do you think running multiple versions of the program, each simultaneously running the plugin, would be a valid test of whether IMDb would tolerate this kink of hammering?

From an accessed site perspective what is suggested will demand the same or less than the current approach so the risk is low there.
The concurrency happens at different web sites.

Running multiple versions of PVD partially tests a much higher risk implementation imo.

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As such documenting program use instructions in a forum is the opposite to what we need.

I, of course, disagree with this. We have a wiki. It doesn't seem to be used much, and there's quite obviously no one with any interest in contributing to it. So the evidence seems to be to the contrary.

The suggestion was to address nostra's observation that the perceived PVD complexity is a significant barrier to a new novice user.

Unfortunately it seems like many users have difficulties when starting using PVD.

I agree we all tend to be more interested in addressing issues relevant to what we do. Unfortunately the issues are different for the novice compared to a regular forum contributer.
The form is a good way to explore new and complex problems.
It is not a good guide for a first time user who just want to try out PVD to see if it meets there needs. Many will walk away.

So we interpret the evidence differently.

The idea of running in parallel is fine—assuming each field is filled using only one source.

In option 1) above the plugins for an individual movie are run in series ensuring all the current data dependencies are preserved. ie with time on the horizontal axis

movie 1 imdb -> movie 1 allmovie -> movie 1 amazon
--------------> movie 2 imdb      -> movie 2 allmovie  -> movie 2 amazon
----------------------------------> movie 3 imdb      -> movie 3 allmovie -> movie 3 amazon

Resulting in all sites being accessed in parallel. The how to do this is what the separate tasks and queues were for in the earlier post.

Even more problematic is the idea of getting only data for fields that need it. (I'm not sure this is what you meant, but it's implied by "maybe a lot faster for later incremental updates to an established PVD database.") Data changes. The only way to determine whether data needs to be updated is to compare it to what's currently available. So it's faster just to download all the data.

It would be helpful if fields set to "ignore" were omitted.

Currently for each field we can specify,
a) Solid tick -> get value and overwrite existing value
b) Grey -> store value only if no prior data (so really only need to get in if field is currently empty).
c) White / blank check box -> do not use this value (so no need to get it).

For populated field b & c do not need to bee downloaded, for an unpopulated field c doesn't need to be downloaded.
The potential saving depends on the granularity used by each sites web interface and how slow a particular page is to download. For example images, full cast list and deeper technical pages etc.

Tutorials would probably help alot. A video tutorial on how to add movies, series and how to fix common errors.

Better still, update the wiki while you are still learning and have your best appreciation of a beginners experience.