topics linked in Technical Manual?

[pj]

Hi everyone,
I'm sure I've read less than 10% of the info in the whole technical manual, but it seems that it would be useful if references to appropriate topics of the Forums were included in-line with the TM text. Is there a reason why this isn't or shouldn't or can't be done? If it's okay, I'll contribute to this work.

[Peter van Es]

Although it's useful to include links to forum topics in the Technical Manual, and you can do so, we originally intended for the definitive summary of a forum topic to be included in the Technical Manual, cleaned up and reformatted.

This way a lot of the "noise" and opinion, pro and con, can be removed and a final definitive description, that is concise, can be added.  A good example is the tuning tour being added by Twistedtree. People are making suggestions in the forum thread and Twistedtree is summarizing and standardizing it in the Tech Manual. That's exactly how it was intended to be done, see this explanation.

All full members are free to help out, and no, you can't break anything. If you mess up a page in the Technical Manual, you can always revert to an earlier version.

So have no fear, and help out!

Peter

[pj]

Hi Peter,
thanks for your thoughtful reply.
"We originally intended for the definitive summary of a forum topic to be included in the Technical Manual, cleaned up and reformatted."
I agree that would be the best way to do it. The TM is very helpful and many sections are truly excellent. The expertise and thought that are required to make an improvement to the TM are probably significantly greater than what it takes to dash off a reply or a comment or even a new thread in the Forums. For myself I feel like I'm not knowledgeable enough to select and to edit the posts into cleaned up contributions for the TM. But I am comfortable making connections between TM entries and Forums threads. One way or another, I'll make an effort and I hope to help make the TM better over time.