Re: aims of the wiki?
Hi all,
First I have to say that I think this discussion is very interesting,
and I do agree that in principle setting some goals on what the Wiki is
good. I add here some of my thoughts, as a "Wiki user" (as a translator
my "authorship" is very limited).
On 16/08/25 15:22, Richard Lewis wrote:
> What does debian you want the wiki to be? (a replacement for
> wikipedia? for ArchWiki? something else?)
> who is it aimed at? (non-users? new users? all users? contributors?
developers?)
I'd like mostly to point out one of my major pet peeve/dissatisfaction
with the current wiki: redundancy, both internal and external (with the
website).
I see everybody uses ArchWiki as an example. Disclaimer: I am not at all
familiar with ArchWiki, its website or its wiki. But I took a quick look.
It seems to me from an *extremely* superficial look (time constraints,
as all of us, sorry) that they use the Wiki for everything. For instance
if you go to the Website, the link to the Installation Guide points to
the Wiki, as do other links on the home page of the website. That seems
to me an indication that they made the Wiki the "home" of some important
info.
But we have the website for that in most cases, the Installation Guide
is there, as many other Debian specific manuals and Infos, both
developer- and user-oriented (the DFSG, The Social Contract, the Release
Notes, the Policy...)
In my opinion, this was a problem now with our wiki, people thought
those were important things, and they are, and so they got somewhat
replicated in the wiki. I think it's not useful to have the same
information twice just worded a bit differently, such creating a double
effort in keeping everything up to date.
I think it would be best if the wiki just referenced the relevant
page(s) in the website (or the other way around if it seems more
reasonable, like the ArchWiki seems to do). Or just have a Wiki page if
it adds some specific use cases or instructions.
I understand that a documentation on the wiki (as installation
instruction) might be (or feel) more user-friendly than a somewhat
"old-style" manual like we have... but is it replicating the
instructions a solution? This is somewhat a whole new level of
discussion and would mean rethinking all Debian documentation and website.
We had some pages with info on packages that added very little to what
one can find in packages.debian.org - a description, a screenshot,
installation instructions (which are the same for every package...)
Then of course there is the problem with not wanting to delete/change
parts of a page to not offend the author and so recreating a different
page with some of the same information creating internal redundancy. But
most of all, again, creating 2 things that have to be kept updated
instead of one, multiplying the effort needed to maintain the wiki contents.
> what kinds of pages should and should be there -- I see several
> different types of pages at the moment, eg
> 1. working space used by various debian teams (useful)
> 2. documentation of debian-specific things - [[sbuild]],
> [[SourcesLits]], [[DebianOn]] (useful)
> 3. documentation of generic linux things (are these really that
> useful?) - [[systemd]], [[Hardware]], [[SymLink]], even [[FrontPage]]
>
> the 3rd category seems to encourage some structural issues to me, but
> it's not unreasonable to have them -- but what does the project want
> from pages like this?
While I do agree that the first 2 categories are useful and the 3rd
category might be less relevant, I would think it was OK if it brought
new content or content not easily found elsewhere, and if it wasn't the
simple rewording of other things.
What is the use of having a link to Wikipedia and then have contents
that are more or less the same that can be found in the Wikipedia page?
It is of course different if you add some Debian-specific contents to that.
Or, as you said, ... do we want to be a replacement for Wikipedia for
all things Linux? - good on paper, but realistically do we have the
workforce for that?
Personally, I find this conversation is more about the journey than the
destination.
but before that there is - how and why are we travelling?
This is a great way to put it!
As much as it pains me to say it, I think the Wiki (old and new) would
benefit from a more strict Merge/Delete policy to avoid redundant or
outdated contents.
It is difficult because we always have to remember that authors are not
paid to fill the Wiki with information, they are volunteer too, so we
cannot force them to write what we would like to (we can do it ourselves ;)
So, sorry for the long message, especially since I have no real
answers/suggestions, but only doubts and I somewhat wanted to try to get
out every idea I had so far reading all of your discussions.
Thanks a lot to everyone involved, for all the working that has been
going on, and is going on on the Wiki.
A good day to all,
beatrice
P.S: no nedd to CC-d me, I am subscribed to the list.
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