Written by Ram Rachum, developer of GarlicSim.
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GarlicSim’s documentation is now user-editable
UPDATE: Unfortunately Copypasta died. It was an awesome project but it’s no longer maintained. I removed the “Make a Correction” buttons. It was released as open-source, so I hope someone out there adopts it. This could be a good start-up.
A while ago I stumbled upon a very cool tool by Kurt Mackey called Copypasta. As the website describes it: “Copypasta is a collaborative editing tool. Readers submit edits, authors approve changes, everyone wins.”
It’s still a young and experimental project, but it’s quite promising. It often happens that I’m reading a friend’s blog post and I see something that I want to fix, like a typo or a grammar mistake. What I usually do is fire an email to that friend alerting him to the typo. This is of course inefficient. Copypasta lets you edit the page yourself in the browser, and then it shoots an email to the site owner with your proposed changes.
Currently it requires the site owner to put the Copypasta button on the website for it to work; in the future Kurt might release a browser plugin that will let you edit any site on the internet. That will be really awesome.
So I decided to put Copypasta on the GarlicSim documentation site. (This is a Sphinx-based documentation site.) Now anyone can offer fixes for GarlicSim’s docs! Let me know if there are any bugs.
I hope that more Python package maintainers will do this for their projects’ documentation so we could all help to improve each other’s documentation.
Now what I want is a Sphinx backend for Copypasta which will be able to automatically change the documentation source in the repository, possibly creating a GitHub pull request with the changes to the docs source… But now I’m fantasizing :)
