Negatively Voted Notes

Hi!

There are currently nearly 20000 notes in the documentation, with many
having a very high negative rating.

For example, there are:

1131 notes older than a year, with a rating less than -10
2339 notes older than a year, with a rating less than -5
5761 notes older than a year, with a rating less than -1

The worst offender is:

https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.cookies.php#128286 with -159 (not sure why the website says -153)
https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.attributes.overview.php#126887 with -104

We discussed this during one of our foundation meetings, and we propose:

• to delete all notes with a rating less than -5 that are older than a
  year.
• come up with a plan to crowd source going through the other thousands
  of notes to see if they need to be deleted or integrated into the
  actual text. Each documentation page now has a link to the XML source
  (such as https://github.com/php/doc-en/blob/master/language/attributes.xml)

Comments?

As one of the primary persons that tries to triage new notes, I am strongly in favour.
Unrelated, it would be very nice if we could improve the spam filters for user notes somewhat, but this is unrelated to removing unpopular votes.

One question, should this possibly become a monthly cron job that checks for the user notes and removes those that fall below the above criterias?

Best regards,

Gina P. Banyard

Hi!

There are currently nearly 20000 notes in the documentation, with many
having a very high negative rating.

For example, there are:

1131 notes older than a year, with a rating less than -10
2339 notes older than a year, with a rating less than -5
5761 notes older than a year, with a rating less than -1

The worst offender is:

https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.cookies.php#128286 with -159 (not
sure why the website says -153)
https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.attributes.overview.php#126887
with -104

We discussed this during one of our foundation meetings, and we propose:

• to delete all notes with a rating less than -5 that are older than a
  year.
• come up with a plan to crowd source going through the other thousands
  of notes to see if they need to be deleted or integrated into the
  actual text. Each documentation page now has a link to the XML source
  (such as
  https://github.com/php/doc-en/blob/master/language/attributes.xml)

Comments?

cheers,
Derick

--
https://derickrethans.nl | https://xdebug.org | https://dram.io

Author of Xdebug. Like it? Consider supporting me:
https://xdebug.org/support

mastodon: @derickr@phpc.social @xdebug@phpc.social

This is something im both For and Against.

On the for side, alot of these notes are negative rated for a reason, bad
code, bad advice, incorrect usage, etc etc

But on the against said is removing information, no matter how bad the
code is or misunderstood, in my eyes no information should be removed. Let
users see others' mistakes, so they dont repeat them.
This is what the rating system is for. The only stuff that I wouldn't be
against is clearly
advertising/promotional/spam posts.

If we had a thread system for these comments, so others can reply, they can
point out mistakes/bad code/incorrect usage and those reading can learn
what and what not to do.

Hi

Comments?

For now I'm only asking to give me the time to go through the ext/random
stuff myself before the automated deletion is performed (i.e. defer this
until after feature freeze at least).

Similarly to what Fennic Log replied, for ext/random I can see how some
of the bad comments could serve as good data for new warnings to add to
the documentation. Randomness is pretty unintuitive and it's easy to
make conceptual mistakes that other folks made before.

Best regards
Tim Düsterhus

We discussed this during one of our foundation meetings, and we propose:

• to delete all notes with a rating less than -5 that are older than a
  year.
• come up with a plan to crowd source going through the other thousands
  of notes to see if they need to be deleted or integrated into the
  actual text. Each documentation page now has a link to the XML source
  (such as https://github.com/php/doc-en/blob/master/language/attributes.xml)

Comments?

Yes, please.

The original intent for the notes system was to allow low-effort contributions from people who would otherwise not learn how to edit DocBook to make contributions (and in an era where you couldn't just do easy pull requests on GitHub, but had to send patches to a list or send smoke signals or something – it was a long time ago).

Notes were never meant to be precious or long-lived, and I don't see any problem with leveraging the voting feature to automatically cull notes that have been voted down. Waiting a whole year to eliminate notes with a large negative rating is probably longer than necessary.

Jim

We discussed this during one of our foundation meetings, and we propose:

• to delete all notes with a rating less than -5 that are older than a
  year.

As general consensus was that this correct, I will be creating a script
for this.

One of the other suggestions was to also have a public list to show all
notes with the highest or lowest rating, and add these to the weekly
status report (like https://news-web.php.net/php.doc/969388402). I will
be creating a script for this too.

• come up with a plan to crowd source going through the other
  thousands of notes to see if they need to be deleted or integrated
  into the actual text. Each documentation page now has a link to the
  XML source (such as
  https://github.com/php/doc-en/blob/master/language/attributes.xml)

Hopefully, this is going to get some work behind it soon too.

cheers,
Derick

--
https://derickrethans.nl | https://xdebug.org | https://dram.io

Author of Xdebug. Like it? Consider supporting me: https://xdebug.org/support

mastodon: @derickr@phpc.social @xdebug@phpc.social