Possible addition to ROOL site

How about a glossary page which would explain some of the technical concepts and terminology in plain english? This could be very useful resource for a non-techincal user, maybe somebody dipping their toe or someone who obtains a ready set up system.

Things such as Boot sequence, Compiler, Firmware, Command Line, Assembly, Code, WIMP etc are all familiar to most of us, but for someone new they may mean nothing.

That sounds like a good idea – the RISC OS specific terms might not be understandable even to technical people. Do you want to make a wiki page with a few basics to start off, and then other people can contribute? Make sure you’re logged in, then click the Documents button on the site navigation bar. Then edit the URL in your browser so say something other than ‘HomePage’, maybe something like ‘Glossary’ – that’ll make a new wiki page where you can put in new content. Don’t forget to edit another page with a link to yours so it doesn’t get orphaned!

OK, I’ll have a go. Probably at some point over the weekend.Is there a sandbox? Will someone be able to remove the page if I make a mess?

I don’t think there’s a sandbox, but changes you make within (I think) 30 mins of one another should overwrite the immediately precedent version, so a long history of changes won’t be created. (This was to cater for the lack of a preview function IIRC, but Andrew Hodgkinson could probably elaborate if necessary.) Personally, I wouldn’t worry about any “mess”, as others can always amend the contents.

Are we talking about “An Introduction to RISC OS” or an entire user guide? Ok, it’s going to be a glossary but even that could get quite involved. There’s of course Trevor’s Wikipedia project, which could provide some useful content/starting point.

Would it be desirable to have a German translation too? That’s something where I could help, just not sure if it’s really worth it.

I was thinking of including a glossary in the revised Welcome Guide – but that’s stalled until someone does something useful with it. Sorry.

Trevor’s Wikipedia project

I don’t want to split hairs, but it’s not my project. Anyone can join, and it’s owned by the Wikipedia community. It was co-founded with Peter Howkins and is part of the wider Computing WikiProject there.

As to the suggestion itself, yes I believe that a number of items could be included there, but they’d probably need specific connections for inclusion within a sub-article such as List of RISC OS user interface elements and would need established notability, etc. etc. And that wouldn’t include the non-UI stuff, such as Boot sequence, Compiler, Firmware, Command Line, Assembly, Code. It’d certainly be simpler and less restrictive to include some info here first, e.g. at RISC OS glossary or similar.

Sorry Trevor, I didn’t really think of it as a possesive genitive but to give Rebecca a reference in case she hadn’t heard about it. It might have been a bit misleading though.

Understood. No problem.

Now we’ve finally got the RISC OS Pi release out of the door, you can feel free to take my “welcome guide” HTML pages and munge them about into the ROOL wiki however you all see fit. This is something I’d do if I had the time but realistically, I think there are other things I should be getting on with when this is the sort of thing others can help to do.

I’ve chucked an archive of just the welcome pages here.