Re: Culling obsolete pages on wiki.debian.org
Hi Borden,
>>>>> On Fri, 19 Aug 2022 21:12:06 +0200 (CEST), Borden <borden_c@tutanota.com> said:
> A lot of it should be removed since it will just frustrate new users and lead to more traffic on -users as people ask why a squeeze (or earlier) tutorial doesn't work on their system.
I'm also a friend of removing outdated stuff, especially if the content
was not maintained since a long time (and changing
http->https is not maintaining the content).
I tried to to some cleanup in the wiki in the past, but I stopped it,
because sometimes the discussions about keeping the article or not are
frustrating.
For e.g. I found this very strange page containing no special Debian
information but only very general info. I wanted to remove it, then
someone started to rewrite it and it took some months and a few mails
before I could delete it.
https://wiki.debian.org/WebDevelopment?action=info
I would like to see more quality in the wiki articles. I don't think
it's worth having articles about non Debian specific topics,
because often you will find this infomration somewhere else in a
much better quality. A lot of Debian developers look into the
archlinux wiki for reasons.
Do we need a page like this? https://wiki.debian.org/NFS
If I want to know things about NFS (and I use NFS a lot), how to
secure it or how to debug it, the Debian wiki pages are not a good
source of information, they would never have helped me.
It links to some very old NFS documentation, link to other outdated
wiki.debian.org pages about NFS, talk about the user space kernel
server (which does not exists any more)....
This may be a good example for just remove most of the NFS infos in
the Debian wiki, they are to general, outdated, and only cover some
aspects of the topic. Other web pages already do this much better, and
we do provide Debian specific NFS information in our wiki.
I often hear we should keep old things for historical reasons.
No. Very outdated wiki or web pages are not useful and they make
our search results (on the wiki and on the web pages) to be very bad.
I prefer removing old content but if we like to keep some of it, we
should keep it on a special web domain, maybe historical.d.org.
We should aks ourself how many people are interested in reading those
old information? It it worth keeping them?
Just a few examples
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/PowerPC/OldWorld
https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf6Planning
https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf6Soccer
https://wiki.debian.org/Format
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/GUIToDo
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/de/2009/LinuxTag
https://wiki.debian.org/LinuxTag/DebianWomen
Are these article worth keeping them? I'm sure we have hundreds or
thousands of such articles.
Sorry, if I ranted too much about old content. I try improve the
quality of the web pages since a few years, but failed to work on the
wiki because of too much content.
I wish you luck doing some cleanup or updating articles.
--
best regards Thomas
Reply to: