Re: aims of the wiki?
On Tue, Aug 19, 2025 at 01:52:23PM +0000, Ceppo wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 19, 2025 at 11:37:32AM +0100, Andrew Sayers wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 18, 2025 at 10:42:00AM +0200, Beatrice Torracca wrote:
> > > 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 ;)
> >
> > I think this is the key point. It makes sense to ask "what are the aims
> > of www.debian.org?", because the www team have exclusive access and can
> > agree what does and doesn't go there. But the question doesn't make
> > sense for a world-writable resource - we can only talk about the aims of
> > *our team*.
>
> I don't understand your point. Why would it not make sense to set a scope
> for the wiki? How is it relevant for it that it is world-writable?
> The website has prior review and the wiki doesn't, but it doesn't mean that
> a content policy on the latter can't be enforced subsequently by removing
> out-of-scope articles.
Hmm, another way to put it might be that it's important to ask not just
*how valuable* a given bit of content is in an abstract sense,
but *what our relationship is to it* personally...
Say we find a page we agree violates the aims of the wiki (e.g. a TV show).
What is the best course of action?
* we could cluck our tongues about how the author is a bad person,
then move on to other business
* we could delete the page immediately and call it spam
* we could add a big "off-topic" header and leave it be
* we could contact the author and have a conversation
* etc.
If the only thing we've agreed is that "this violates the aims of the wiki",
then clucking is all we can do because we haven't agreed anything that informs
a better course of action.
If we agreed that we're just here to support other teams, that implies other
teams' opinions are the main input in the decision-making process. They might
say "I hate seeing this spam in RecentChanges" or "we like asking newbies to
write a random page so we can learn their writing style", leading to the second
or third choice being obviously correct.
Or if we agreed that our aim was to support all comers in becoming the best
documenters they can be, even if that means accepting low-quality documentation
in the short-term, the fourth choice would be the natural answer.
In other words, deciding what constitutes "good" content is only half of it.
It's at least as important to ask what we should do about that content.
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