Wiki history, reporting bugs and not enough info.
Hi all,
Please do CC me if somebody answers this. First of all, Thank you
all for your hard work.
Now I am a new guy/newbie who have been trying to use and understand
some of the Debian documentation and probably (or not) many webpages
in the Wiki seem to have no structure and exhibit some flaws. While
there are number or pages where I have seen/feel the problem/s I am
taking one wiki page as an example to show what I feel is lacking. All
of this is when I'm not logged into the wiki but just as a lurker. I
am comparing the structure and the way things vis-a-vis say Wikipedia
which might feel unfair to some but I feel it would do everybody a
whole deal of good. Also I don't know if things magically get better
if I do sign in and feel its always better to see things as how
somebody who doesn't know Debian would look at and came into the Wiki
looking for things.
Please look at the wiki page
http://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/BootPerformance . Now this page is
not a new page and from what I understand it was one of the original
ideas I see several issues with that page (not the content within it
though for the moment) as it exhibits some 'failures' as I have seen
in other webpages as well.
a. Not able to see history :- I do not know if I said this before or
not, I would like to see the history as it tells me where it came from
and how/where things change. The versioning and diffing of articles is
as important if not more than the actual content within the article
itself. I tried looking in the more Actions sub-menu if there is/was
some option that I missed. I do see a greyed out 'Revert to this
version' but that just doesn't make sense. I have seen this happening
at almost all the pages. Another example for the same is/would be
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianIndia/MiniDebConf2011 or/and
http://wiki.debian.org/Games/Suggested or
http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise/InterestingSoftware . I used all of
these examples as they have all been changed within the last 24 hours
(with the exception of the BootPerformance wiki article)
b. No idea about the author and no ways to connect with him :- The
idea of having a wiki and the revisions is also able to know who the
people who are interested in one thing or the other. If we take the
same page http://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/BootPerformance one sees
at the bottom of the page the name 'PetterReinholdtsen' but
unfortunately Mr. Petter Rein holdtsen' or 'Mr. Petter Reinholdtsen'
forgot to put up his page. This doesn't tell me if Mr. Petter is a
Debian developer/ Maintainer or a user like me. Now of course one
could assume just like one assumes in Wikipedia that he is either a
very interested party to the cause/article or he knows better as he
somehow got the access to write on an immutable page. Of course
digging a bit more about him and seeing some of the bugs and digging
through them I came to know that he in fact is a developer who is
working on that.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=539591
My main/moot point is that for a newbie it isn't easy to know if the
Wiki entry has been vetted by a Debian developer or not and how much
to trust the content. There should be some way to expose this to users
better.
c. User-generated content and where/whom to approach :- Now, from what
little I know a wiki is a good way to get, publish and share
user-generated documentation. Now I do not know where or what is
permissable within the Wiki . Now here I'm looking at it a bit like
Ubuntu Wiki where the users have also put up some info. about how
various packages work. For e.g. I find 'youtube-dl' whose little older
is there in the archive a good tool to download youtube videos and as
its a command-line program it would be cool to document some of the
various options and what happens when you try 'X' or when you try 'Y'
and what happened things like these. But I do not know if there are
some guidelines published anywhere as to what would be cool but failed
to find it. Looking at the help contents just take you to MoinMoin
help and not anywhere to ask questions or queries.
http://wiki.debian.org/HelpContents
d. Lastly, is there some virtual package where I can file these
bug-reports (against some virtual package) using reportbug so I'm able
to track any or all these issues .
There were few more things which I'm failing to recall atm so that it
from now. Hope to hear from either of the teams.
Thank you for your patience as well.
--
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल
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