[Hamara-devel] having a glossary on terminology ?

[shirish]

Hi all,
What do people of having a glossary on-site ?

Q. what's wrong with the glossaries in most web-sites ?

Answer - The problem is, most sites do not have glossaries AFAIK. The 
ones which do have are more techy-oriented in the sense that they 
answers are more towards technically-inclined rather than using analogies.

Q. Why use glossaries and not using FAQ's which already exist on hamara 
wiki ?

FAQ's by their very nature are very narrow-focussed to a subject matter. 
Glossaries are meant to be more broader and wider than that.
All the different acronyms that we know or are using now or would use in 
near future could be part of it. I am sure that at times anant, aparna, 
saurabh would have come across words or acronyms they had to look up at 
few sites before understanding it. It's the same with me as well. We 
could very well use such a glossary to prevent others from having to do 
the same thing.

Another thing, the glossary is not to be limited to just acronyms but 
also concepts as the one I shared above.


Q. why not use the wiki or/and the blogs for the same?

Because it is difficult. It is much easier for people to comment on an 
fb.com page, on twitter or even talk on e-mail then on wiki or a blog
the number of people who would take time to do that falls down to almost 
1% or thereabouts. Why, for the simple reason that it needs some 
studying. Learning a mark-up language (which wiki requires) or blog 
which has more social conventions which need to be imbibed, the cost of 
sharing that on social web is almost negligible and you can do it 
anonymously if you want to.

Even if authentication was easy (which isn't) you would find that of the 
100 people who would say something or react or something on fb.com or on 
IRC/Slack, the ratio drops down considerably when you go on wiki or 
blogs. If needed can provide numerical evidences for everything I shared 
above.

@Aparna you could do add lots of testing-related material.

@Anant - you could ask as well as answer all and any system-admin stuff 
and so on and so forth.

One of the simplest example which comes to mind atm is

Q. What is a linux container ?

Now most sites would go on all about the functionality that a Linux 
container provides but almost none of them will tell that it's basically 
like a mobile home or like a tortoise which in essence is what it is. 
The only difference is instead of having a foundation like other houses 
do, a linux container, you could just dump it over the existing house 
(host system).

Why use a linux container?

Because it can be made to look just as your home. So if you need to do 
some drastic changes to your home, you could do it in this house and 
even if it breaks, no sweat, your original house is still safe.

Of course instead of a house, we could use some other object which might 
make more sense or be more relevant, the analogy would still hold.

In fact we could have such small FAQ's on such topics in form of 
glossaries in no-time at all because having

We could even give a call for such terminology questions and answer them 
using analogies and all.

They could post it on the mailing list or fb or wherever and we will
answer them on our wiki.

What do people think of the above ?

-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org