I personally like what’s coming out of this discussion. And I really like the demo (thanks @pmario!) But…
In the light of this discussion and the numerous galvanizing threads that it spawned, I do wonder if we’re locking ourselves into an echo chamber.
So, “pretending” I’m new to TiddlyWiki and further pretending I want to learn about variables, I just visited
the demo and typed “variable” into the search. What appears is a promising list of choices performing much better than before (I’d say).
Then, with my “I’m a noob” hat on, I started opening the listed choices…
In a word, bewildering. This looks like developer documentation, not anything a noob would benefit from. There are so many tangled opportunities to “get lost” (breadcrumbs anyone?) it’s the kind of thing that makes students nervous – “Have I read everything? What if there’s more here somewhere? How do I tell?”
And then I spot a tag, “Variable Usage”, the same name as a tiddler I already have open, listing even more weird things like “Behaviour of invoked variables depends on how the variable was declared” – which, by the way, is waaaay down the list of choices offered by the search. If the key threshold concept (which, as a noob, I don’t even know I need) is buried that far down the list…
Well, you get the point.
Again, I love what’s coming out of this effort. It’s going to be extremely useful – for me. And of course, my ponderings above could just be a reflection more on the nature and characteristics of the documentation itself – it’s hard to say for certain. But I do wonder if it’s surfacing the stuff we want and ignoring what a notional noob user actually needs.