User talk:Zvsmith

Hello! Since you are the only one I see editing the Common Lisp wikibook since last several weeks or so, I would like to ask you whether you have some sort of a plan or a "vision" for the further development of the book. Do you have any ideas and is it reasonable to cooperate with somebody else to improve the book?--VictorAnyakin (talk) 10:11, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Hey. I have no idea if this is how I am supposed to communicate here. I am pretty new to actually editing wikis. If I don't get some response from you soon, I will try something else.

To answer your questions:

Before anything else, I did not start this wikibook, nor did I ask permission for editing it. I hope this isn't bad form, but I very rarely changed things which did not originate from myself. So I am not sure how much my vision really matters. That said, I did have a vision, though, mainly regarding the external libraries section. I have always thought Common Lisp libraries seem to lack ample examples. I am trying to alleviate some of this. I was hoping, at least to start, this could be sort of a Lisp Cookbook for a select group of external libraries. Incidentally, I contacted some of the people involved in the 'Lisp Cookbook' (but not in an official capacity) but they seems less interested in the idea than myself. Over the last year, I have been assembling some demos of various packages and thought I would put them on a web server somewhere, but this is probably a better solution than that.

I could see that this last section could become a book unto itself. And it could be a great deal more useful for people who have gotten of that first little speed bump of a learning curve. I don't want to recreate the CLiki, I want a sort of user based documentation effort where the thought behind the implementation is just as important as the functions and macros that the package exports.

Also, I would very much like to see some people filling in some of the missing sections. Things are pretty sparse in there. Cooperation is the entire point of a wiki, right? All cooperation is welcomed from my viewpoint.

Lastly, am not sure of the qualifications of the individual that wrote the introductory chapters. They fail to express some of the ideas I find important, and worse, they seem misleading in certain regards. This has been done well several times by several people (of instance Paul Graham and Peter Seibel) but I know of no well thought out, GNU FDL or equally free introductions out there.

Zvsmith (talk) 17:59, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your response. It looks really like a true vision for the future of the "External libraries" section at least. And the way I imagine this section is pretty similar.
 * I have got some experience editing Wikipedia stuff (mainly Ukrainian) and could help you with some technical aspects of Wikipedia.
 * So, Feel free to ask any questions about Wikipedia. I have added this talk page to my watchlist, so I will be notified of the changes whenever I check it.--VictorAnyakin (talk) 19:55, 8 September 2008 (UTC)