Note: You are currently viewing documentation for Moodle 1.9. Up-to-date documentation for the latest stable version is available here: Common acronyms.

Talk:Common acronyms

From MoodleDocs
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

Wikipedia links

A good page, thanks David and Darren :-) Let's add Wikipedia links for acronyms which don't require specific Moodle definitions e.g. PHP. --Helen Foster 20:45, 14 April 2006 (WST)

Links to other acronym sites would also be useful so people don't get carried away and try and list all of the TLAs they can think of. --Darren Smith 20:51, 14 April 2006 (WST)
I'd personally recommend not linking directly to external sites such as Wikipedia unless it is from the single most relevant page within Moodledocs. In database terms, this would be called incomplete normalisation, as one page might link PHP to wikipedia, another might link it to php.net, a third might have a typo that takes you to php.not. By directing them all to a single MoodleDocs page, people can build on and correct the contributions of others in one single place with potentially many internal or external links leading from that single point.
Possibly more importantly I think most MoodleDocs articles have an implicit "in the context Moodle" at the end of their titles. So while there's probably no place for the general history of, and miscelleaneous trivia about PHP in Moodledocs, there's plenty of questions and related info about "PHP in the context of Moodle" and the MoodleDocs PHP page is probably the best place to put them. These questions might start, for most people using MoodleDocs, with "What on earth is X? (assuming basically no context or prior knowledge)" followed by "Why should I as a Moodle user (possibly Student/Teacher/Admin/Developer, or a combination of these) care? (with 'you don't have to' often being the most welcome answer)" and then finally, the relevant info, or pointers to other (internal and external) articles with relevant info e.g minimum supported versions, coding practices etc.
So part of the reason for creating this page (beyond the obvious goal of explaining what acronyms mean), was to encourage Moodle docs participation in two ways a) because adding a definition to a list of acronyms is an incredibly small step compared with creating a whole article, or even a whole paragraph in an article, and b) because people's need for closure and completeness compels them to fix links that lead nowhere. Currently people are fixing them by linking outside of MoodleDocs, but I think it would offer more opportunities for community building if they were either started as stub articles, or left as inactive links. There was originally only one or two acronyms that I thought didn't need articles written, but I left them as links too so that as people added new links they'd follow the consistent pattern and add their own contributions as empty links too, hopefully that would be enough to convince them (or someone else) that they could start the full article too.
I was also thinking that a Jargon page might also be useful, with words like Blog and Wiki that people may have never heard before, as well as words like Teacher, Student and Course which might lead you astray if you make assumptions about what they mean in the context of Moodle.
Also worth noting in terms of inter-page linking, that I like to think of these kinds of list pages as semi-random indexes, which along with a good number of links within articles, can encourage serendipity and lead to people finding answers to the questions they never thought to ask.
--David Scotson 00:03, 19 April 2006 (WST)
David, thanks for your interesting and insightful comments :-) Please feel free to remove Wikipedia links, as appropriate. --Helen Foster 18:46, 19 April 2006 (WST)