User blog:Taldin/Substance, Style, and Sub-Par Writing

I write.

If you've been following my blog at all? That much is obvious by now. But on my journey to get to 100 consecutive days of edits on the Wiki (answering a challenge by Axial Gentleman), sometimes there's not a lot _to_ write, and it's easy to just find a page that needs capitalization fixes and use that as the daily requirement.

But that's not going to get me my contributor tier. "Substantial Contributions" is a nebulous thing. It's about making a difference to the community, instead of just fixing minor things. So while I'm lurking just below the cutline at #20, I look for bigger things to do.

Rearranging the FAQ was the task I was given when I applied for my Tier 1 promition earlier this month. But that beastie is huge. Like, an amoeba that doesn't quit growing when you look at it funny. And when I look at it funny, it has things Wrong With It that I know I can fix, but there's no easy way to do it in small pieces. Worse, it's a moving target.

It's funny. When I write my novels, I'm a 'pantser' -- someone who writes at the speed of plot and without a lot of planning ahead. But that's when I write for fun. I can express my own style, and create my own substance out of thin air. It's dialogue, suspense, action, emotion, turns of phrase and quick wit. I choose how reality warps to my demands.

When I write for the Wiki, however, everything is factual. You can't 'pants' a wiki. It must bend to reality, rather than the other way around. There are _style_ rules that must be followed, or it's Wrong. Tone and voice. Capitalization rules. File naming conventions. There is no freeform except when you write original stuff, and you're writing original stuff based off of a somewhat fixed subject -- so it's hard to find new territory to write off of, except when you have something new come out, and then you have to be faster than the other Wiki authors who are writing the same thing -- only with more style, panache, and graphics!

(I'm looking at you, Hann Solo.   )

You have to plan what you want to write, and it has to fit the theme, and my hat (a circa 1997 Tilley Endurables T1, by the way) is off to folks like Darks Lanfear, who summarized Steven Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People over the course of what seemed like a week, in painstaking detail, and yet condensed a thick book down to a readable webpage. Impressive, and it raises the bar for everyone else.

There's a reason both of them got their Contributor tier. :)

But I digress.

When I write FAQs for work, it's usually working from a blank slate. I'm a user of the product, and I know what I, as a new user, would want answered. If I wanted to rework the FAQ, I'd nuke a whole bunch of questions and start with the basics -- which might be better placed in a tutorial set of pages instead. But that was something someone else was supposed to be working on, and I don't want to step in their territory. I figure if they haven't gotten to it by the time I get to level 100, it's fair game. So for the most part, I'm just keeping notes in my head as to what ought to be on there, and responding to new features as I see them.

I spent about four hours in a hospital waiting room last Friday, though, and one of the things I took with me was the FAQ printout I made. So I did a lot of analysis on the information, and I know exactly how I want to rearrange the existing questions and answers -- but it's going to be messy for a bit. And if I snapshot what I have to a sandbox page, then I'm going to be potentially out of sync unless I do it _fast_. And so I am stuck, paralyzed by the sensation that I can't do it all at once, and I can't do it in pieces, and if I do it, will other people recognize it?

Therein lies the trap of being a documentation specialist - it's _easy_ in some ways to write brand new material, and very, very, hard to adapt existing source material and have it all hang together. You not only have to do that, but also make it so in a shared document situation, it can be easily modified as a working, or at least have detailed instructions on how to get in there.

Because Step 1 of what I want to do is to put a serious index at the top of the page, instead of the rapidly-getting-unwieldly FAQ-TOC, but it requires a little Wikia programming knowledge instead of just plunking the new link down under the other ones, that I had to hunt down and search for.

One other thing about me: I used to be a programmer. I studied Computer Science in college, and learned just enough programming to realize it wasn't something I could make a career out of. Dabble and dream, yes. But when it came down to big projects, the bigger it was, the more likely it would implode when compiled.

This doesn't implode currently. It's just messy, and there are limitations, and the precursor to was what I was working on for the Quick Reference Card for Scribes, until I got asked 'when was it going to be done', and then I just went with the original Plan A, which was to make the PDF available through the link there. I may still put that in there, because it's still a cool idea, and the Writers Guidelines for Scribes is almost as hefty as the FAQ, but it does have its own self-generating TOC, too... decisions decisions!

So the answer, I guess, is to document what I'm doing, and hey, I get _two_ days worth of edits in for the price of one!

I'll get to 100 days in a row yet!

Taldin (talk) 00:06, August 26, 2014 (UTC)

Too long, didn't read version:  Challenge yourself to write new (but relevant) content instead of being content with just capping your contributions with caps work. Only then will you earn your tier promotion!