[gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org>]

On 3 April 2010 11:46, Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 04/03/10 11:16, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
>> People are constantly asking for a documentation wiki, but ...
> yeah, as long as no one just creates a wiki there won't be one. People
> are waiting on other people, who are waiting for Godot. Just do it.
>
> I remember the long and whiny road to get a blog aggregator - what
> killed the waiting deadlock was simply karltk setting up one (unofficial
> etc.etc.) and suddenly people saw that it was good.


Okay, so it seems a lot of people do want a wiki. So let's see what
we can do to make that happen.

1 - requirements
================

In order to choose the best possible wiki implementation, we need to
know our requirements. So what features do you think are essential or
good to have? What syntax would we prefer to use?

I myself am a big fan of reStructuredText, which is quite simple,
easy to pick up, highly readable, and has a good featureset. Plus, it
is also reusable in other contexts (it is for example widely used in
documentation of Python libraries). MediaWiki, MoinMoin and Trac have
support for rst.

Some others:

- active upstream (bug fixes, security updates)
- free open source software
- ACLs
- spam prevention measures
- attachments (to upload screenshots for example)
- feeds

Other distros and open source projects surely have had the same
considerations. Can we find out and learn from them?


2 - maintainers
===============

Who is volunteering for maintaining the wiki? We need editors and
moderators, people who look out for quality control and take care of
spam removal. So let's get together a team. I'm sure if we ask on the
forums we'll get some users interested as well.


3 - edit access
===============

Do we keep to the original "free for all" model, with all the spam
that includes, or do we go with registered users only? I think the
latter is the smarter option. I also think we will want to mark
certain pages "official" and lock down editing rights.


Is there anything else we should consider before getting started?

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer