On Mon, Aug 18, 2025 at 10:42:00AM +0200, Beatrice Torracca wrote:
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).
This is a point I strongly agree with. I was pondering to write something like your message myself - so thanks for doing the hard work :)
That seems to me an indication that they [Arch] made the Wiki the "home" of some important info.But we have the website for that in most cases [...]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 suspect the reason of redundancy lies partially in the editing workflow: the website requires knowledge of HTML, WML, git and GitLab, and the patience to wait for the commit to be merged; the wiki, on the other hand, requires only a browser and [quickstart] for the syntax. So, new or occasional contributors go to the wiki - but much important or technical content is (also) on the website because it was first published there, maybe literal decades ago, before the wiki existed. And I expect the balance to move more and more towards the wiki, especially after the transition to MediaWiki is complete.
[quickstart]: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianWiki/EditorQuickStart
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.
Establishing guidelines on the wiki content inherently affects other places where Debian stuff is published, especially if goals include avoid duplicate contents. It means more work to do, but I would take it as a chance to improve Debian documentation as a whole. I believe the ideal solution would be a single content guideline that, given a page, makes clear if it belongs either to the wiki OR the website (or elsewhere?). As a rough example: "put 'official' documents/statement/whatever decided or endorsed by Debian on the website, Debian-related but 'not official' stuff in the wiki, and non-Debian-related stuff in none of them".
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.[...]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.
I also agree on both of these, but overcoming the "ownership" philosophy could help solving redundancy and obsolescence. Since updating existing articles is easier than rewriting content from scratch, I believe that if contributors were confident about not offending the original author, then they would be willing to take care of existing articles. Defaulting to CC BY-SA may be a first step to this goal, since writing in the wiki now implies accepting changes from other people.
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.
The long message was highly appreciated :)I hope I manage to keep up with the discussion despite some chaos hanging over me for the next weeks.
Cheers, -- Ceppo https://wiki.debian.org/Ceppo Please, encrypt our messages with the key at the link above and send me yours.
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature