Proposal: don't publish crap articles

[toma42]

The article posted on 9/7/02 is crap. The article it was based off of was crap and the discussion on that first article should have been enough for nobody to ever bother with it, however, someone went and created a whole new pile-o-crap article which simply made the original pile-o-crap article that much higher and stinkier.

When Tim was still running this the articles tended to be better (certainly not all of them). It seem the editors now have dropped the ball on reviewing and rejecting those articles that should have never been written.

PLEASE: php has progressed a long ways since Tim's days but the articles here employ ancient and outdated concepts. Editors: start rejecting articleS, or, even better:


SUGGESTION: allow peer review of articles (ala medical and other professional publications) before posting them to the main page. I think implementing this would greatly improve the usefulness of the artilces published here.

[dannys]

Why not show us all how it's done by submitting your own articles? :)

Though I don't totally disagree with your comments - the general standard for articles around here is pretty low - I just think it'd be better to do something constructive about it rather than simply whine about the situation.

[toma42]

Writing for phpbuilder is really low on my todo list, but I am totally willing to review articles before they are published to the front page.

I don't expect peer review to happen here, however. Time will tell, but so far no phpbulider staff have made a sound regarding my post.

[dannys]

Last time I checked, internet.com owns PHPBuilder anyway - and they've yet to produce anything great throughout the entire network IMO. :)

[jstarkey]

Originally posted by toma42

I don't expect peer review to happen here, however. Time will tell, but so far no phpbulider staff have made a sound regarding my post.

I'm here.

The articles are coming in very slowly, TBH, but we're trying to get one up each week. Three people have said they'll have articles to me in the coming weeks, so we'll see.

I've created a forum called 'Article Requests/Ideas' which will hopefully promote ideas and a place to give feedback, before the fact.

[toma42]

jstarkey: that looks like a good start. What I would really like to see is a 'under review' area where articles under concideration to publish will be kept. From here more advanaced php users can read them and give them a thumbs up or down for more public publication.

[quandrie]

This is all very laudable. I love that word...
Aaaaaaanyway, peer-review is a good idea, as long as it doesn't involve the culling of articles about subjects that the more jaded peers regard as "kids stuff". Do it on the basis of quality, but please not on knowledge level. There still are many people starting out, or intermediate, who can be quite intimidated by the stuff that many article writers on many tutorials consider to be a given fact.
For example, I consider myself a fairly decent cottage industry "clockwork constructor" (I'm into metaphors) as far as PHP is concerned, but get totally baffled by all the fabulous classes, libraries, libs, nukes, etc. As in: how to actually employ them. In all of which, I realise, lies the real power of Open Source.
I have not discovered yet one book, let alone tutorial, that gets one up to speed with the possibilities of PHP in a general overview kind of way, and then expanding into For Dummies nitty gritty. Hey...come to think of it, maybe I should get PHP for Dummies. Duh.
But keep it up y'all. All I've learned of PHP sofar has been from the web, and I'm actually earning a living from it, of sorts.

[Rayn]

Why didnt you start with this thread toma42 :confused: