[wp-forums] Drupal support

[Craig]

An interesting read. Having been heavily involved at one time in both
support and documentation, the one thing that comes to mind right now is
development. I think that WP would benefit from developing people in a
semi-formal way. Mentorship is one way.

For example, I was keen on documentation. Along with Podz and Carthik and
others, we got the initial wiki going (after we convinced Matt LOL) and then
made the transisition over to MediaWiki and Codex. This is where our lack of
system would have helped me...I was not wiki-savvy. Soon we had lots of good
folks jumping in to help out, and they were indeed wiki-savvy. However, what
happened was that soon these people were basically doing everything, while
people like me wound up being relegated to the sidelines.

Please do not construe this as an attack or sour grapes. I could have
learned on my own how to do a lot of things, but the point I'm trying to
make is that had I been paired up with someone who was more advanced than I,
we could have had two "experts" in time. Then we train two, and they train
two etc. You get a CSS-effect in your documention team development. The same
would be true for support.

Right now the support and Codex are dominated by a small group. Again, this
is not an attack or judgement, it's simply the reality of a lot of work to
be done, and only a core group of folks with the occasional help from a lot
of others.

I believe that WP has grown to the point where there needs to be some
"middle management" and those folks who would so choose could become
involved towards managing support and managing documentation almost as
distinct open-source projects of their own.

I hope that I have made some sense in this post. I'll ruminate a bit more
and add to this discussion later.

Craig.