Finding the Wiki (was: Re: [OS X TeX] Tex to rtf converter)

[Herbert Schulz]

On Aug 5, 2010, at 1:41 PM, Adam R. Maxwell wrote:

> 
> On Aug 5, 2010, at 10:38 AM, Gerrit Glabbart wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Am 05.08.2010 um 18:38 schrieb Adam R. Maxwell:
>> 
>>> There are a number of help vampires [1] here asking questions out of idle curiosity or without doing any homework.
>> 
>> Help vampires -- now that's a useful, if slightly unkind, term! (though as long as there are willing, er, suckees, I'm not sure how much of a problem these kinds of questions really are. List traffic is not /that/ high, is it? As long as nobody gets sucked dry, of course...)
> 
> Unfortunately, some people have been sucked dry and left the list.  The willingness of donors to help is often their downfall...
> 
>>> If links to the wiki/FAQ/documentation are posted, everyone will learn that there are more resources than just this list.
>> 
>> That's good advice, but wouldn't that be more work for the kind souls who provide the bulk of the answers here? It's my impression that people are more likely to respond to a question if they know the answer off the top of their heads, without having to look anything up.
> 
> In the short run, it may be more work.  In the long run, it should (in theory!) lead to the questioner being able to provide useful answers in future, and/or actually do some work before asking a question.  Also see "Cease enabling behavior" at
> 
> http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/
> 

Howdy,

On of the major problems with folks simply ``googling' for information is that there is a great deal of stuff that is outdated (hey, I've found a bunch of stuff that goes back to LaTeX2.09) and, too often, just plain wrong with newer distributions (putting files in locations used in old teTeX systems won't work with newer TeX Live systems) or on different computers (using updmap vs updmap-sys and when do you use sudo). I've seem many problems produced when folks have picked up outdated information.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)