On Sun, 30 May 2010, Akemi Yagi wrote:
Surprisingly, there were very few from the mailing lists in the first Google 50 hits. As I mentioned there, the objective of the search is not to compare which is more "popular" but simply to present the fact that, when people go to Google and do a simple search, they tend to see Forum posts. This in turn means we need to make sure there are no misleading or inappropriate answers. So, you can help there, too.
Interesting observation, but the forum content is additive, and so filled with blind alleys for a indexing engine that cannot distinguish supposition and mistake from authoritative content. Without the editor's pen to excise errors, we just have mass there; compare contra the wiki where there is at least the possibility of revision [What? R P Herrold liking some aspect of a wiki? Is there an impersonation?] and better (bug slower) feeding changes through the proper bug tracker [so that minor ephemeral edits to not get forgotten] into a long lived work (upstream 'man' and 'info' pages, the increasingly good upstream manuals)
Also I see a lot of 'boilerplate' in first responses in the forums adminishing people to read the instructions, and welcoming people which has the effect of increasing bulk but not adding light. I do not see merit in the fact that Google, for example, has 15000 hits for: "site:centos.org welcome to the CentOS fora" ... and it is not at all clear that this is the correct plural to anyone but a pedant with a bit of grammar school Latin willing to confuse non-native speakers of English
-- Russ herrold