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We have 97 guests and 3 members online| Winner of LaTeX Community Article Contest |
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| News - LaTeX Community |
| Written by Sven |
| Sunday, 05 April 2009 08:22 |
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At the end of March, our contest for the best article for our Know How section has finished. I am happy to announce, that the winner of the iPod Nano is Thiago S. Mosqueiro from Brazil for his brief and concise description of the RevTeX 4 package. Congratulations Thiago! Thiago's article was followed by Nicola Talbot's description of the glossaries package and Ivan Pagnossin's description of (La)TeX's box mechanism.
The end the contest was clouded by a rating attack to the articles: It seems as if someone tried to influence the contest's results by giving a lot of bad votes to the leading articles. Two days before the end of the contest, Thiago's article was rated with 4.83 out of 5 points and at the end it were only 3.96 because of several one star ratings. Similar rating decreases happened to the other articles. I am very unhappy and disappointed by that, but luckily in the end the one article won the contest which had the highest rating all the time since the contest started. I am very happy about the new articles in the know how section and I hope, that further articles will follow - even after the end of the contest. |
Comments
obviously I'm not as happy as I could be, since I didn't win;), but congratulations Thiago!
And now being more serious: I planned to write a bit more articles (in fact, to translate some pieces from my blog) - and resigned after the first. Unfortunately, the user interface of the editor is just terrible - especially when you are used to (La)TeX and wiki markup... If this is changed - for example, when it's possible to upload an artictle written in some subset of LaTeX - I'll most probably contribute a bit more. Now I feel it's a waste of time - it took *a lot* of time and effort to write the short piece I did... Maybe if I had a faster computer (or were more skilled with the Joomla editor)... Now I'm going rather to translate them and put on my website.
There is also a question of what is really needed in the Know-How section. Please, don't treat this as a comment of an angry user who just lost the contest - but I can't really see the point in rewriting users' manuals here. It seems that most people disagree - maybe the RevTex manual is badly written - but the fact that the two highest-ranked articles were essentially redundant, i.e., repeating something that can be found in *one* place (the manual), is a bit astonishing. Did the bad practice of not reading the manuals sneak into the TeX community? I guess that it might be a good idea for the authors of these articles to contact the relevant package authors and work to include their articles as tutorials in the manual.
Still, I have an RSS bookmark of this site in my reader, so that I will be able to follow what's going on here (and my experience shows that it is worth following!). Keep up the good work!
at first: thanks for your comment!
Regarding the editor: I know that the current version of the editor is unacceptable and I am already working on a version with BBCode markup (similar to what you may know from the most forums and similar to wiki syntax). Until this is available, it is already possible to provide articles with HTML markup. The biggest issue is still the preview which is not working as expected...
Regarding the goal of the Know-How section: The idea for the know how section came to me from the work on the LaTeX Community forum: A lot of users where asking questions and many questions repeated. This brought up the idea to me, that it would be good to provide those, posting answers to the forum, a possibility to share their knowledge by writing articles.
My intention for know how articles was information which is not available easily already or at least not in this combination. An idea would be a more task oriented description, than a package oriented description (e.g. "I want to do this and that and that can be best done by using the following packages in the following way). Another great idea: In the forum some one has written a quite comprehensive comparison of available LaTeX editors. I think there are a lot of other possibilities not mentioned here.
Regarding just repeating existing information, I partly agree with you: We should not simply repeat user manuals. On the other hand, the response has shown, that the people like the information provided in these articles. Nevertheless I like your idea of contacting the original author of the user manual...
Regards
Sven
I really think it is NOT a comment from a "upset" user, and I will try work on it! I actually would like to thank you about this comment.
I could talk with Physical Review editors (PRB and PRL) last years, and this is one of the reasons I have tried writing this article. It seems to me that the RevTeX 4 have one central manual (the oneS you can find in RevTeX 4 home page), but without all the information available in other non official manuals/tutorials. One example is the "widetext" environment, wich I could not find in RevTeX 4 central manual, as users who have contacted me in past mounth. Actually, I found it in RevTeX 3 manuals (Changes from RevTeX 3). Of course that you can send me a link in wich this environment is commented, but the fact is that I (and other users) could not find it.
Eitherway, I'm already writing a new article and I will for sure remember this post!