Re: Debian is testing Discourse
On Mon 20 Apr 2020 at 23:05:54 (-0400), Celejar wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Apr 2020 21:33:37 -0500
> David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> In my experience, the content of the Arch wiki is ofter far superior to
> ours, not just the organization and structure.
I don't know what the writer of those two sentences meant by
structure, but I specifically mentioned the Discussion page
(≡ Wikipedia's Talk page) which I think is an important
factor in improving content.
Here's how the Debian wiki sometimes works (or, rather, fails to):
A to list> I have a problem with …
B to A> Doing so-and-so should fix it.
C to A> Try doing this. And I guess you should also do that.
B to C> Why would you do that? That's wrong; see wiki on Foo.
C to B> But surely X suggests to do Y. Your fix is confusing.
B to C> Read the wiki which shows so-and-so is correct.
C to B> I disagree, it doesn't show that.
B to C> OK, I'll explain in great detail just what's happening.
(Detailed explanation follows.)
C to B> Great, that really explains it well. Perhaps that summary
should go on the wiki.
B to C> Anyone can edit the wiki. (Implying: Why don't you do it.)
So the person who made a poor suggestion showing that they didn't
understand the problem, but now (one hopes) has a slightly firmer
grasp of what's going on, is left to edit the wiki. (In this case,
five years ago, they declined.)
Now compare with Arch's "Contributing". Do you think the Debian page
for "Foo", above, is on anyone's watchlist?
> > 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:
>
> But the Debian documentation you mention doesn't cover a great deal
> of practical, real-world areas of system configuration, maintenance,
> and use, at least not in any useful, up-to-date way.
I was being charitable.
> The Arch wiki, in
> my experience, simply does a much better job at documenting this sort of
> stuff than any Debian documentation.
That's why I wrote "curated". There are some dedicated people working
on their wiki. Look at their News or Statistics pages.
Cheers,
David.
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