Re: Debian is testing Discourse
On Mon 20 Apr 2020 at 13:13:50 (-0400), Celejar wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Apr 2020 10:19:13 +0300
> Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ...
>
> > about Debian on non-Debian platforms (like StackExchange), the other one
> > being the Arch's wiki (significantly better than Debian's).
>
> Everyone loves the Arch wiki - I've long wondered why it's so much
> better than ours. Do they just have more community-minded users?
It looks better curated, organised and structured. The latter is hardly
surprising when you read Debian's FAQ¹:
Q) Wouldn't the wiki be more useful if it was better organized?
A) Possibly, but a structured wiki is largely a contradiction in terms.
It's more important to give it good content.
Another weakness is what lies behind the pages:
Q) How do I keep track of changes?
A) By using two features accessible via the sidebar menu:
the link to the RecentChanges page (limited to a week for visitors,
90 days for logged-in users);
the Subscribe option, which requests e-mail notification when the page is modified.
With ~16½ thousand pages², and up to 90 days of time-ordered changes,
I would imagine it's difficult to keep track of what's up-to-date or
being worked on.
The Arch wiki pages have a discussion area where changes can be
debated and the page can be refined, as well as a History area
that I haven't seen (because I'm not registered on their system).
So they have different philosophies. Perhaps Debian puts more effort
into the packages themselves, the installer, and documentation like
the Reference Manual, Release Notes etc, whereas AIUI Arch relies
more on its wiki. And I think Debian has a much broader scope:
how many architectures does Arch support? Not even 32-bit PCs.
For all their faults, I think the two wikis complement each other
rather than trying to compete, and I use both, generally navigating
via search engines.
¹ The one at the bottom of the EditorGuide
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianWiki/EditorGuide
² There are far fewer content pages really, but the TitleIndex
listing, which I counted, includes the name of all the people
who edit the wiki. It would be nice to have them separated.
Cheers,
David.
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