[Wine] Re: The pros and cons of a wiki AppDB

[fcmartins]

Well, I can certainly confirm there is a barrier for drive by submissions. As a matter of fact the barrier is even bigger than one might anticipate (as an occasional user):
- sometime ago I submitted test data for a game. It was rejected with: Please fill the "What does not work". I had written something like: "I've done only initial gameplay". I believe the reply was implicitly there, so IMO it was a unneeded barrier. Anyway, I tried to oblige with a more explicit reply, and guess what: the submission was not working: After submit, the form came back with the old data!! So, another barrier. Furtermore, I sent an email to webmaster with the issue, but never heard anything back.

As you can imagine, this has lowered my willingness to submit test data, and lack of updated info for newer versions of wine is THE major problem with appdb.

On the positive side, I had two comments in Sacred deleted by the maintainer as a cleanup, and I felt the deletes were appropriate and educative.

Anyway, I think appdb mostly works and putting a wiki as a full replacement would be a mistake. As it is, appdb has maybe a tiny bit too much structure and bureaucracy, but going to the wiki and loose all the structure would be silly.

The UI and function of appdb is mostly quite good: I would look for small tweaks lowering the barrier for contributions: some areas could work like a wiki: the description, screenshots, and an always present howto. The howto should be always editable and invite people to improve it with their own tweaks, minimising the user having to go through the comments to find a possibly inexistent needle.

I would definitely look into a simpler form to submit test data, but above all, I would look into having one of those wine appdb love days (weeks) were test data is put up to date, e.g. for a forthcoming 1.2?