Re: aims of the wiki?
On Fri, Aug 15, 2025 at 12:53:40AM +0100, Richard Lewis wrote:
> In the discussions about migrating the wiki, i wonder if there has
> been a discussion of what the debian wiki is actually aiming to do --
> is there a statement or consensus around its purpose, aims, uses,
> audience, etc?
>
> I looked on the wiki itself but didnt find anything specific.
>
> I wondered if this list would be a good place to discuss that, as it
> that might inform your migration plans?
>
> (and also because I may want to help, but i worry i might offend
> someone by editing/deleting the wrong thing!).
The idea of writing a "mission statement" has come up a couple of times,
but not in enough detail to write something up in DebianWiki/WikiRevamp.
Here are some specific points:
To what extent do we want to encourage using the wiki for "official" stuff?
For example, DEPs would be easier to translate on the wiki, but people would
find it harder to tell whether they were looking at the settled will of the
community, or just a mistranslation from a well-meaning newbie.
To what extent should a mission statement be driven by practical concerns,
as opposed to principles? For example, using CC-BY-SA 4.0 has implications
for people who want to paste code snippets into publicly-released programs -
does that mean the wiki aims to be a place to workshop merge requests?
Maytham drafted some guidelines[0] before the new wiki took shape.
Hopefully he'll correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that was about
starting a conversation that's grown significantly, so should be read
as inspiration rather than intention.
Personally, I find this conversation is more about the journey than the
destination. For example, early on we discussed migrating content manually so
we could guarantee licenses. We quickly realised that would be incompatible
with any reasonable mission statement, so now we're planning to migrate
everything automatically.
And the only wrong edit right now is to put stuff on wiki2025.debian.org
and expect it to stay there - as the site notice says, the whole thing may be
wiped without notice. That said, it's worth getting feedback on IRC about
hard-to-revert changes to the current wiki - for example, it's hard to pick
good page names, and people don't like when URLs change.
[0] https://wiki.debian.org/MaythamAlsudany/DraftContentGuidelines
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