[gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Josh Saddler]

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Hey again. So there's some discussion (again) on starting up an official
Gentoo wiki. Official meaning it's hosted on our infrastructure; e.g.
wiki.gentoo.org. This time the discussion is coming from our fellow
developers and infra overlords.

I know that the GDP discussed this any number of times on this list, and
some of us (most notably myself and neysx) have discussed it on the
forums, with occasional feedback from other developers.

However, it's been quite awhile since the last time we (the GDP) talked
it over. Given our current issues of manpower and time (see
archives.gentoo.org for commit totals), perhaps a wiki could solve some
issues?

The classic problems are:
1) Who has access
2) Who reports faulty articles
3) Who fixes them
4) Who verifies the article is correct
5) ???
6) Profit

So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
not? If so, for once, does anyone have some *sane* ways to admin and
moderate such a wiki?

There's no question that having a properly-administered wiki can be a
powerful asset. Look at Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, the Xfce wiki, etc. What
about Gentoo?

Halcyon has brought it up again on https://bugs.gentoo.org/75855, but
BEFORE I/we go over there and weigh in, let's hash it out here on our
list. :)


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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Thomas Raschbacher (Gentoo)]

hi

i like the idea even though i'm not part of the doc team .. i'm on the
list for some reason but that fine ;)

maybe we could get some help from gentoo-wiki people and/or 'merge'..

just my 2c (i don't know previous discussions or anything btw so if this
was mentioned before just ignore me ;))
On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 01:16 -0800, Josh Saddler wrote:
> Hey again. So there's some discussion (again) on starting up an official
> Gentoo wiki. Official meaning it's hosted on our infrastructure; e.g.
> wiki.gentoo.org. This time the discussion is coming from our fellow
> developers and infra overlords.
> 
> I know that the GDP discussed this any number of times on this list, and
> some of us (most notably myself and neysx) have discussed it on the
> forums, with occasional feedback from other developers.
> 
> However, it's been quite awhile since the last time we (the GDP) talked
> it over. Given our current issues of manpower and time (see
> archives.gentoo.org for commit totals), perhaps a wiki could solve some
> issues?
> 
> The classic problems are:
> 1) Who has access
> 2) Who reports faulty articles
> 3) Who fixes them
> 4) Who verifies the article is correct
> 5) ???
> 6) Profit
> 
> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
> not? If so, for once, does anyone have some *sane* ways to admin and
> moderate such a wiki?
> 
> There's no question that having a properly-administered wiki can be a
> powerful asset. Look at Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, the Xfce wiki, etc. What
> about Gentoo?
> 
> Halcyon has brought it up again on https://bugs.gentoo.org/75855, but
> BEFORE I/we go over there and weigh in, let's hash it out here on our
> list. :)

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Ben de Groot]

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Josh Saddler wrote:
> However, it's been quite awhile since the last time we (the GDP) talked
> it over. Given our current issues of manpower and time (see
> archives.gentoo.org for commit totals), perhaps a wiki could solve some
> issues?

> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
> not? If so, for once, does anyone have some *sane* ways to admin and
> moderate such a wiki?

I for one, am very much for a an officially Gentoo-hosted wiki. The
unofficial wiki has been a very valuable resource, even with its
shortcomings. I think we should bring it on board and offer the security
of our infra resources.

I am of the opinion that we should see the wiki more or less as we do
the forums. It is a place where users can contribute to the Gentoo
community. I would expect most of our users are internet-savvy enough to
understand the nature of a wiki as user-generated and user-editable
content, and therefore not being as reliable as say our official
documentation.

We could form a team of moderators (from both user and developer base)
that would do some quality control, similar to what happens on
Wikipedia. They could indicate articles of particular value and quality,
as well as indicate if there are issues (outdated, incorrect,
incomplete, etc) with specific articles.

I don't see the "classic problems" as problems at all, as long as the
nature of a wiki is taken into account.

> 1) Who has access
Everyone. To restrict this would be a mistake, in my opinion, and
against the open and free nature of a wiki.

> 2) Who reports faulty articles
Wiki users (and mod team)

> 3) Who fixes them
Wiki users (and mod team)

> 4) Who verifies the article is correct
Wiki users (and mod team)

We could add a disclaimer to the footer along the lines of: this wiki is
open and free for everyone to edit, therefore Gentoo cannot guarantee
the accuracy of its content.

-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux developer (lxde, media, desktop-misc)
Gentoo Linux Release Engineering PR liaison
__________________________________________________

yngwin@gentoo.org
http://ben.liveforge.org/
irc://chat.freenode.net/#gentoo-media
irc://irc.oftc.net/#lxde
__________________________________________________



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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Sven Vermeulen]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 10:16 AM, Josh Saddler <nightmorph@gentoo.org> wrote:
> However, it's been quite awhile since the last time we (the GDP) talked
> it over. Given our current issues of manpower and time (see
> archives.gentoo.org for commit totals), perhaps a wiki could solve some
> issues?
>
> The classic problems are:
> 1) Who has access
> 2) Who reports faulty articles
> 3) Who fixes them
> 4) Who verifies the article is correct
> 5) ???
> 6) Profit

I think we need to drop the incentive that the documentation on that
wiki is validated by a developer. The moment you work with
community-driven documentation, this is almost impossible to achieve.
In my opinion, the moment we would start a wiki, we use it for what it
is made for: community-driven documentation development.

However, I would use the following practices:

- Specific documentation that is "dangerous" to execute should have a
big red warning block, telling the users that this is not common
practice, is dangerous to execute, might result in yielding support
from developers, yada-yada. Examples of such topics could be
bootstrapping, editing portage code, specific C(XX)FLAGS, ...
- Translations of documentation are free to perform and should not be
reigned by rules such as "must be based upon a revision of the English
documentation". This does assume that the topic in the wiki is
self-explanatory.
- Wiki information pertaining to ~arch stuff should be in a different
namespace or some other way of destinguishing them (if not, even a tag
would help) that informs people that ~arch ebuilds are not tested
enough and can contain bugs

As manpower is important with wiki's (think of spam regulation), it
would be nice if we could tie forum accounts to wiki accounts, and
edits on the wiki are only allowed with accounts (no anonymous
editing). The moment a spammer occurs, account deletion should result
in some practice where all his/her edits are checked (I believe this
also occurs on forums, but I'm not sure).

Note that I'm not suggesting that forum admins should work on wiki's
too - if they want to, that's great, but it's a different playground
and I wouldn't want to push them into responsibilities they didn't ask
for ;-)

Wkr,
  Sven Vermeulen

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Goran Mekić]

> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
    If you try to simplify things (suppose there's no spam, no obuse),
wiki could be a great pool of potetial official documentation. As I
see it, this is the greates value of wiki. "Just" pick good articles,
refine them and move them to official docs. As a person who never
administrated wiki, I have no clue how to secure it.

-- 
FreeB(eer)S(ex)D(rugs) are the real daemons

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Thomas Raschbacher (Gentoo)]

On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 11:41 +0100, Goran Mekić wrote:
> > So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
>     If you try to simplify things (suppose there's no spam, no obuse),
> wiki could be a great pool of potetial official documentation. As I
> see it, this is the greates value of wiki. "Just" pick good articles,
> refine them and move them to official docs. As a person who never
> administrated wiki, I have no clue how to secure it.

How practical/possible is it to add some kind of 'verified by a
developer / moderator' flag / tag which cannot be changed by normal
users and only applies to a specific version of the page?

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Josh Saddler]

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Goran Mekić wrote:
>> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
>     If you try to simplify things (suppose there's no spam, no obuse),
> wiki could be a great pool of potetial official documentation. As I
> see it, this is the greates value of wiki. "Just" pick good articles,
> refine them and move them to official docs.

. . . no. There's zero point in doing all the work twice (original
article and then XMLifying it.) Especially since now you have twice the
maintenance burden, and it IS harder to maintain XML docs than wiki
articles.


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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Peter Volkov]

Seeing how many users are weeping for gentoo-wiki.com's content (its
database was lost) I'm sure that gentoo must have own wiki.

В Втр, 11/11/2008 в 01:16 -0800, Josh Saddler пишет:
> it's been quite awhile since the last time we (the GDP) talked
> it over. Given our current issues of manpower and time (see
> archives.gentoo.org for commit totals), perhaps a wiki could solve some
> issues?

I think wiki should never be associated with GDP project. It's a
separate entity - it's primary goal is to provide a single place where
our users could share solutions for their problems. Yes it may help GDP
project - users and/or developers could write initial proposal there and
when document will be considered good GDP will convert it to guidexml
and publish it. But until document is on wiki GDP has no responsibility
for content published there.

> The classic problems are:
> 1) Who has access

Everybody.

> 2) Who reports faulty articles
> 3) Who fixes them
> 4) Who verifies the article is correct

It's wiki: if article faulty and user wishes to improve he/she fixes it.
Mods are required to help to solve technical conflicts between users and
to remove spam. Also they could help to organize content...

-- 
Peter.

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Josh Saddler]

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Ben de Groot wrote:
> I for one, am very much for a an officially Gentoo-hosted wiki. The
> unofficial wiki has been a very valuable resource, even with its
> shortcomings. I think we should bring it on board and offer the security
> of our infra resources.

Nope. The gentoo-wiki.com owner has already stated on the forums that he
doesn't see a need for it to be hosted on our infrastructure. More to
the point, he told our infra guys this when we offered him a box (he got
a better overpowered offer elsewhere).

> I am of the opinion that we should see the wiki more or less as we do
> the forums. It is a place where users can contribute to the Gentoo
> community. I would expect most of our users are internet-savvy enough to
> understand the nature of a wiki as user-generated and user-editable
> content, and therefore not being as reliable as say our official
> documentation.

Unfortunately, they do *not* understand this. Just look around the
forums. Users are greatly surprised when wiki or forums tutorials break
their boxes, then get busy pointing fingers and wondering why no one's
updated the article. Or they notice that no one really knows; there's
not a "solution" as such for their issue.

If users see a wiki on gentoo.org, it seems more like it counts as
"official, verified" information. Maybe the smarter ones  recognize that
like the forums, it's limited and unofficial, but by and large we
*cannot* depend on users understanding this.

I think Ubuntu tackles the issue a bit differently -- there seems to be
somewhat of a distinction between official-ish wiki/wiki articles and
community articles. At least the basic stuff, like About, Installation,
Desktops, etc. seems to be more or less
Canonical-written/approved/official. Just try searching around to see
where the differences start to creep in. Though their wiki sucks for
searching and returning coherent results.

> We could form a team of moderators (from both user and developer base)
> that would do some quality control, similar to what happens on
> Wikipedia. They could indicate articles of particular value and quality,
> as well as indicate if there are issues (outdated, incorrect,
> incomplete, etc) with specific articles.

I suppose there would have to be flags/tags similar to wikipedia's "Out
of date/needs review", with some sort of way of notifying
admins/mods/devs/whoever about it.

>(and mod team)

Who is this mod team, really? I've seen some proposals for forum mods,
but none of them have expressed any interest in it; they've enough work
as it is. The ebuild devs aren't so interested in it; they're not
interested in docs of any kind, and they've enough work as it is doing
ebuilds. Basically, the developer pool is out.

And really, I don't know that I trust the users, given what
gentoo-wiki.com has turned into. We've seen how far most the users can
go, and it's not enough.

Infra has only said that they are willing to host one, and administer
the server hardware itself. Spam and day-to-day article maintenance
would not be performed by infra.

> We could add a disclaimer to the footer along the lines of: this wiki is
> open and free for everyone to edit, therefore Gentoo cannot guarantee
> the accuracy of its content.
> 

That's shooting ourself in the foot right there. Personally, I don't see
the point of a resource that cannot be verified nor vetted for
correctness. In my view, documentation simply must be accurate,
otherwise we are doing ourselves and our users a disservice.


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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Josh Saddler]

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Thomas Raschbacher (Gentoo) wrote:
> hi
> 
> i like the idea even though i'm not part of the doc team .. i'm on the
> list for some reason but that fine ;)
> 
> maybe we could get some help from gentoo-wiki people and/or 'merge'..
> 
> just my 2c (i don't know previous discussions or anything btw so if this
> was mentioned before just ignore me ;))

Yeah, it has. You may wanna search our archives or the Gentoo forums for
posts by me on the subject. :)

In short, a merge won't happen, as the gentoo-wiki owner has stated he's
not interested in us hosting the site. More on that in another email in
this thread.


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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Josh Saddler]

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Thomas Raschbacher (Gentoo) wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 11:41 +0100, Goran Mekić wrote:
>>> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
>>     If you try to simplify things (suppose there's no spam, no obuse),
>> wiki could be a great pool of potetial official documentation. As I
>> see it, this is the greates value of wiki. "Just" pick good articles,
>> refine them and move them to official docs. As a person who never
>> administrated wiki, I have no clue how to secure it.
> 
> How practical/possible is it to add some kind of 'verified by a
> developer / moderator' flag / tag which cannot be changed by normal
> users and only applies to a specific version of the page?

No idea. That would depend on whatever wiki system is actually
installed, I imagine. And I haven't heard from Infra what they'd be
willing to install.



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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Goran Mekić]

> . . . no. There's zero point in doing all the work twice (original
> article and then XMLifying it.) Especially since now you have twice the
> maintenance burden, and it IS harder to maintain XML docs than wiki
> articles.
    I've never gave it a thought, but it looks logical. That being said,
is GDP ever going to switch to wiki, if wiki prooves it self as good
enough? Anyone can se few (dis)advantages of this, of course, but is
it even considered as an option?

-- 
FreeB(eer)S(ex)D(rugs) are the real daemons

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Ben de Groot]

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Josh Saddler wrote:
> Ben de Groot wrote:
>> I for one, am very much for a an officially Gentoo-hosted wiki. The
>> unofficial wiki has been a very valuable resource, even with its
>> shortcomings. I think we should bring it on board and offer the security
>> of our infra resources.
> 
> Nope. The gentoo-wiki.com owner has already stated on the forums that he
> doesn't see a need for it to be hosted on our infrastructure. More to
> the point, he told our infra guys this when we offered him a box (he got
> a better overpowered offer elsewhere).

Did he do that after the recent debacle? I think he would be more
interested now. (Yes, people can change their mind...)

I don't think it would be worthwhile to start a competing wiki and
divide the userbase.

>> I am of the opinion that we should see the wiki more or less as we do
>> the forums. It is a place where users can contribute to the Gentoo
>> community. I would expect most of our users are internet-savvy enough to
>> understand the nature of a wiki as user-generated and user-editable
>> content, and therefore not being as reliable as say our official
>> documentation.
> 
> Unfortunately, they do *not* understand this. Just look around the
> forums. Users are greatly surprised when wiki or forums tutorials break
> their boxes, then get busy pointing fingers and wondering why no one's
> updated the article. Or they notice that no one really knows; there's
> not a "solution" as such for their issue.
> 
> If users see a wiki on gentoo.org, it seems more like it counts as
> "official, verified" information. Maybe the smarter ones  recognize that
> like the forums, it's limited and unofficial, but by and large we
> *cannot* depend on users understanding this.

Well, then it is a case of educating the ignorant, I'd say.

> And really, I don't know that I trust the users, given what
> gentoo-wiki.com has turned into. We've seen how far most the users can
> go, and it's not enough.

>> We could add a disclaimer to the footer along the lines of: this wiki is
>> open and free for everyone to edit, therefore Gentoo cannot guarantee
>> the accuracy of its content.
> 
> That's shooting ourself in the foot right there. Personally, I don't see
> the point of a resource that cannot be verified nor vetted for
> correctness. In my view, documentation simply must be accurate,
> otherwise we are doing ourselves and our users a disservice.

So in essence you are against an open wiki, that can be freely edited by
users. In that case you're turning a wiki into just a different backend
for the official documentation project. There may be merit in that, but
it is a completely different project, and not a wiki as commonly
understood. And not something I am particularly interested in.

-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux developer (lxde, media, desktop-misc)
Gentoo Linux Release Engineering PR liaison
__________________________________________________

yngwin@gentoo.org
http://ben.liveforge.org/
irc://chat.freenode.net/#gentoo-media
irc://irc.oftc.net/#lxde
__________________________________________________



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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Ben de Groot]

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Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> I think we need to drop the incentive that the documentation on that
> wiki is validated by a developer. The moment you work with
> community-driven documentation, this is almost impossible to achieve.
> In my opinion, the moment we would start a wiki, we use it for what it
> is made for: community-driven documentation development.

Exactly.

> However, I would use the following practices:
> 
> - Specific documentation that is "dangerous" to execute should have a
> big red warning block, telling the users that this is not common
> practice, is dangerous to execute, might result in yielding support
> from developers, yada-yada. Examples of such topics could be
> bootstrapping, editing portage code, specific C(XX)FLAGS, ...

Yes, I agree there should be indications of quality, possible danger,
bleeding-edgeness and so on. As I already said, something similar to
Wikipedia would work here, I think.

-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux developer (lxde, media, desktop-misc)
Gentoo Linux Release Engineering PR liaison
__________________________________________________

yngwin@gentoo.org
http://ben.liveforge.org/
irc://chat.freenode.net/#gentoo-media
irc://irc.oftc.net/#lxde
__________________________________________________



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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Nicolas Sebrecht]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 11:12:03AM +0100, Ben de Groot wrote:

> > 1) Who has access
> Everyone. To restrict this would be a mistake, in my opinion, and
> against the open and free nature of a wiki.
> 
> > 2) Who reports faulty articles
> Wiki users (and mod team)
> 
> > 3) Who fixes them
> Wiki users (and mod team)
> 
> > 4) Who verifies the article is correct
> Wiki users (and mod team)
> 
> We could add a disclaimer to the footer along the lines of: this wiki is
> open and free for everyone to edit, therefore Gentoo cannot guarantee
> the accuracy of its content.

I agree. I think that most users expect Gentoo to host a really opened
wiki. This doesn't mean Gentoo has to guarantee its content. 

-- 
Nicolas Sebrecht

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Tobias Scherbaum]

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Thomas Raschbacher (Gentoo) wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 11:41 +0100, Goran Mekić wrote:
> > > So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
> >     If you try to simplify things (suppose there's no spam, no obuse),
> > wiki could be a great pool of potetial official documentation. As I
> > see it, this is the greates value of wiki. "Just" pick good articles,
> > refine them and move them to official docs. As a person who never
> > administrated wiki, I have no clue how to secure it.
> 
> How practical/possible is it to add some kind of 'verified by a
> developer / moderator' flag / tag which cannot be changed by normal
> users and only applies to a specific version of the page?

Shouldn't be a (big) problem, Wikipedia uses such a feature where
longtime users/mods/$whoever can mark a page as verified.

That being said: We need wiki.g.o.

If it's easily doable do connect forums and wiki accounts/logins - i'd
like that as well :)

  Tobias

-- 
Gentoo Linux - Die Metadistribution
http://www.mitp.de/5941
http://www.metadistribution.eu

https://www.xing.com/profile/Tobias_Scherbaum

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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Xavier Neys]

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Josh Saddler wrote:
> Hey again. So there's some discussion (again) on starting up an official
> Gentoo wiki. Official meaning it's hosted on our infrastructure; e.g.
> wiki.gentoo.org. This time the discussion is coming from our fellow
> developers and infra overlords.

If infra is willing to host it, why not, as long as they keep *all* the fun to
themselves.
Don't expect GDP to be involved.

> I know that the GDP discussed this any number of times on this list, and
> some of us (most notably myself and neysx) have discussed it on the
> forums, with occasional feedback from other developers.
> 
> However, it's been quite awhile since the last time we (the GDP) talked
> it over. Given our current issues of manpower and time (see
> archives.gentoo.org for commit totals), perhaps a wiki could solve some
> issues?
> 
> The classic problems are:
> 1) Who has access

Anyone, it's a wiki

> 2) Who reports faulty articles

Anyone, it's a wiki

> 3) Who fixes them

Anyone, it's a wiki

> 4) Who verifies the article is correct

Anyone, it's a wiki

> 5) ???

me too.

> 6) Profit

Plenty of wor^Wfun for volunteers.

> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
> not? If so, for once, does anyone have some *sane* ways to admin and
> moderate such a wiki?

Just let it live its wiki life.

Please let's make sure it is 'officially *hosted*' and it clearly states its
content is user-driven and not sanctioned in any way by Gentoo.

Use a license that would allow some content to be reused in our docs, you
never know, maybe some articles might be worth it.
gentoo-wiki.com used to use GFDL license (Public Domain was also mentioned, so
no one knows what license people thought they were contributing under).
When pointed out to that fact, they blanket relicensed everything under Public
Domain. Now they use CC-BY-NC-SA. How would we credit everyone if any article
was to be reused?

> There's no question that having a properly-administered wiki can be a
> powerful asset. Look at Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, the Xfce wiki, etc. What
> about Gentoo?
> 
> Halcyon has brought it up again on https://bugs.gentoo.org/75855, but
> BEFORE I/we go over there and weigh in, let's hash it out here on our
> list. :)

Actually, there's no reason it should be discussed here. Take it to the forums
 where the audience is more important. wiki.gentoo.org would be a user-driven
resource, just like the forums are, and I think many users would like the idea.

My $0.0251120


Wkr,
-- 
/  Xavier Neys
\_ Gentoo Documentation Project
/
/\ http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/


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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Xavier Neys]

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Peter Volkov wrote:
> Seeing how many users are weeping for gentoo-wiki.com's content (its
> database was lost) I'm sure that gentoo must have own wiki.

Its DB, not its content.

> В Втр, 11/11/2008 в 01:16 -0800, Josh Saddler пишет:
>> it's been quite awhile since the last time we (the GDP) talked
>> it over. Given our current issues of manpower and time (see
>> archives.gentoo.org for commit totals), perhaps a wiki could solve some
>> issues?
> 
> I think wiki should never be associated with GDP project. It's a

Agreed, this discussion should be happening here.


Wkr,
-- 
/  Xavier Neys
\_ Gentoo Documentation Project
/
/\ http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/


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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Xavier Neys]

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Thomas Raschbacher (Gentoo) wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 11:41 +0100, Goran Mekić wrote:
>>> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
>>     If you try to simplify things (suppose there's no spam, no obuse),
>> wiki could be a great pool of potetial official documentation. As I
>> see it, this is the greates value of wiki. "Just" pick good articles,
>> refine them and move them to official docs. As a person who never
>> administrated wiki, I have no clue how to secure it.
> 
> How practical/possible is it to add some kind of 'verified by a
> developer / moderator' flag / tag which cannot be changed by normal
> users and only applies to a specific version of the page?

Simply impossible.
Sure you can have some 'officially sanctioned' tag on articles, but how do you
garantee it keeps this status.
Anytime anything changes in the article (easy to detect) or anywhere else in
GentooLand and the content can become very wrong.

Let users "vote" on articles, comment on them, provide feedback, and obviously
edit content... Let the wiki live its wiki life.

Wkr,
-- 
/  Xavier Neys
\_ Gentoo Documentation Project
/
/\ http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/


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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Jan Kundrát]

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Goran Mekić wrote:
> That being said, is GDP ever going to switch to wiki, if wiki prooves
> it self as good enough?

Please ask again when the wiki will have run properly for at least six 
months.

Cheers,
-jkt

-- 
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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Josh Saddler]

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Xavier Neys wrote:
> Just let it live its wiki life.
> 
> Please let's make sure it is 'officially *hosted*' and it clearly states its
> content is user-driven and not sanctioned in any way by Gentoo.

Xavier, thanks for your input; it's appreciated. Your proposal makes
sense, but I think it's actually untenable in the long run.

We're going to see what we already have now: a conflict between the wiki
and the "official" documentation.

"Well, the wiki says this, but the official docs say this."
"Which do I follow?"
"Well, the official docs are wrong/out-of-date, just do the wiki, even
though it's harder to follow." Etc.

This is why I feel having a wiki really *is* relevant to the GDP. We'll
be running into the problem we have now, which is essentially a fork in
our documentation, whether that documentation is primarily contributed
by users or developers.

Also, if we do have a wiki, why shouldn't the *GDP* embrace it in some
way? My reasoning here is that we have so little contribution from
*anyone* these days, users or developers. Yes, Gentoo is known for its
accurate, in-depth official documentation, but it's also known for the
wealth of user-contributed articles. I think there will be problems on
down the road if we continue to keep the two completely separate; we're
seeing this even now. There may be some merit in attempting to merge
these disparate documentation bases. Maybe it could be a way to increase
participation from the community.

> Use a license that would allow some content to be reused in our docs, you
> never know, maybe some articles might be worth it.
> gentoo-wiki.com used to use GFDL license (Public Domain was also mentioned, so
> no one knows what license people thought they were contributing under).
> When pointed out to that fact, they blanket relicensed everything under Public
> Domain. Now they use CC-BY-NC-SA. How would we credit everyone if any article
> was to be reused?

Yup, licensing is important; at least Gentoo would control the license
from the start, since as you say gentoo-wiki.com blanket relicensed
content many times over the years.


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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Douglas Anderson]

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Disclaimer: I'm not a dev

Just a few thoughts before this gets thrown out into the wild. Some people
have been saying that a wiki on the gentoo domain would confuse users and
make them think it was somehow sanctioned information. If you've spent any
time in #gentoo in the last month or so, you know that almost everyone
thought gentoo-wiki.com was controlled by gentoo (including myself). So that
would actually be less confusing for most users. Also, everyone pretty much
understands the point of a wiki.

Also, I always liked the idea of GLEP 51 (gentoo knowledge base). The idea
of having some kind of a dev stamp of approval on high-quality wiki
articles, as suggested above, would serve the same purpose. I think it would
be a great way to increase the number of doc submissions. Users and devs who
submitted wiki articles could increase the quality over time, request a
review, and try to get a "This article is part of the Gentoo Knowledge Base"
stamp on it. Just an idea...

Lastly, considering the GDP's reputation for quality docs, I would love if
you were in charge of the wiki. If you're short on manpower, I'm a competent
(enough) user who would love to be part of this new wiki project if it goes
through. Give me a shout next time I'm in #gentoo-doc (djanderson).

-Doug

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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[AllenJB]

Hi all,

First of all, for those of you who don't know, I'm an admin on the new 
Gentoo-Wiki.com and was a long time contributor before that on the old 
wiki. Having said that, while the wiki did occasionally go down, a loss 
like the one that happened will be less likely to happen again as a 
proper offsite backup policy is now in place.

While I would be pleased to see a wiki hosted on official resources as 
Gentoo probably have far more resources at their disposal than any user 
run site could hope to acquire.

However, in saying that I would be concerned about an officially hosted 
wiki from what I've read so far.

It's been suggested that the wiki be moderated by forum mods. I believe 
that a separate team would be needed. Administering the wiki takes at 
least an hour a day (estimate, once it's at "full steam" - it's been 
quiet recently due to the down time, but it's slowly getting busier), 
and that's without considering extra work into tidying up articles - 
making sure they are properly formatted and they don't contain any 
obvious errors or bad practices.

There's also been no discussion on how foreign languages would be 
handled. The new wiki has more supported languages than before - the 
current list (from the topic of #gentoo-wiki on EFNet) is: 
en,cs,de,es,fi,fr,nl,ru,tr

You also need to think about the style in which articles on the wiki 
should be written and the templates used. What will policies be on 
creation of new templates? What will the page naming conventions be?

While a true wiki is open to editing by all, and you may opt to protect 
certain articles (because you deem them to be "official" or whatever), 
you will still need admins who will handle spam, page deletions and user 
restrictions. You will obviously want admins for each language you 
support. Who will they be and what will the recruitment process be? Will 
they get any training?

If you intend to create a wiki to replace gentoo-wiki.com, how will you 
handle this? If the wikis end up running side-by-side, will you have 
policies on copying from gentoo-wiki.com? (You should probably have 
policies on copying from other wikis anyway)

There are probably some other topics I've missed above, but as you can 
see there's a lot that I believe needs to be discussed but hasn't been 
at all. Everyone's saying "yes" for an official wiki, but how much 
thought is going into how it would actually work?

AllenJB

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Jan Kundrát]

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AllenJB wrote:
> While I would be pleased to see a wiki hosted on official resources as 
> Gentoo probably have far more resources at their disposal than any user 
> run site could hope to acquire.

Hi Allen,
that's great to hear, but it's actually a bit different from what Josh 
said earlier in a related thread [1]. I take it that you're actually 
open to being hosted by the gentoo infra, am I correct here? That'd be 
great to hear.

> It's been suggested that the wiki be moderated by forum mods.

I think that this idea got abandoned. We don't want to maintain the wiki 
pages.

[snipped a bit about running wiki and proper workflows]

> While a true wiki is open to editing by all, and you may opt to protect 
> certain articles (because you deem them to be "official" or whatever), 
> you will still need admins who will handle spam, page deletions and user 
> restrictions. You will obviously want admins for each language you 
> support. Who will they be and what will the recruitment process be? Will 
> they get any training?

Well, in my opinion, the wiki is supposed to be self-maintained (as in 
"users themselves are expected to fix spam/vandalism/whatever"). Isn't 
that a concept that works on large wikis pretty well? Do you have 
reasons to believe that it won't work for a Gentoo one?

> If you intend to create a wiki to replace gentoo-wiki.com, how will you 
> handle this? If the wikis end up running side-by-side, will you have 
> policies on copying from gentoo-wiki.com? (You should probably have 
> policies on copying from other wikis anyway)

This reminds me of an "issue" with the license of your wiki. While you 
are of course free to choose any license you want for your projects, 
have you considered switching to CC-BY-SA instead of CC-BY-NC-SA? That 
is a license that is: a) used by all of the Gentoo documentation, b) 
compatible with the recent release of GFDL. The current license, while 
being a bit more protective about user's rights, prevents any contents 
from our documentation or, for example, the Wikipedia, to be used in 
your wiki and vice versa.

And there's also one last point that I believe should be raised here. 
The gentoo-wiki.com, as it is now, currently violates some of the bits 
of our name-logo-usage document [2]. I believe this is not done on 
purpose, but rather as an error. Could you please have a look at the 
document and fix the wiki templates, so that it is compliant with our 
document?

Please don't take me wrong here, I've personally found many of the 
resources available at your wiki really valuable (with some of the 
others being, well, broken). I was sad to see gentoo-wiki going down 
(and can realize your frustration when you can't reach your boxes 
anymore), but even more disappointed when users came to us, the Gentoo 
developers, and expressed that they weren't aware that none of the 
gentoo-*.com projects are *not* affiliated with Gentoo at all.

Cheers,
-jkt

[1] 
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-doc/msg_9ffb2b35be3b5c6724f290dccd0897bf.xml
[2] http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/name-logo.xml


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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Thomas Raschbacher (Gentoo)]

On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 18:30 +0100, Xavier Neys wrote:
> Thomas Raschbacher (Gentoo) wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 11:41 +0100, Goran Mekić wrote:
> >>> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
> >>     If you try to simplify things (suppose there's no spam, no obuse),
> >> wiki could be a great pool of potetial official documentation. As I
> >> see it, this is the greates value of wiki. "Just" pick good articles,
> >> refine them and move them to official docs. As a person who never
> >> administrated wiki, I have no clue how to secure it.
> > 
> > How practical/possible is it to add some kind of 'verified by a
> > developer / moderator' flag / tag which cannot be changed by normal
> > users and only applies to a specific version of the page?
> 
> Simply impossible.
> Sure you can have some 'officially sanctioned' tag on articles, but how do you
> garantee it keeps this status.
> Anytime anything changes in the article (easy to detect) or anywhere else in
> GentooLand and the content can become very wrong.
> 
> Let users "vote" on articles, comment on them, provide feedback, and obviously
> edit content... Let the wiki live its wiki life.
> 
> Wkr,

Well basically you'd have to lock the pages which are really important
or just really well written with a link to another page aobut discussing
it (someone else mentioned that in another mail on this thread)

Also i have to point out that the 'vote' approach would have the same
problems if it just votes on the article nto a specific revision of
it .. ;)

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[AllenJB]

Jan Kundrát wrote:
> AllenJB wrote:
>> While I would be pleased to see a wiki hosted on official resources as 
>> Gentoo probably have far more resources at their disposal than any 
>> user run site could hope to acquire.
> 
> Hi Allen,
> that's great to hear, but it's actually a bit different from what Josh 
> said earlier in a related thread [1]. I take it that you're actually 
> open to being hosted by the gentoo infra, am I correct here? That'd be 
> great to hear.

I'm only an admin. Thrasher, who actually runs the site, would be the 
one to make such a decision.

> 
>> It's been suggested that the wiki be moderated by forum mods.
> 
> I think that this idea got abandoned. We don't want to maintain the wiki 
> pages.
> 
> [snipped a bit about running wiki and proper workflows]
> 
>> While a true wiki is open to editing by all, and you may opt to 
>> protect certain articles (because you deem them to be "official" or 
>> whatever), you will still need admins who will handle spam, page 
>> deletions and user restrictions. You will obviously want admins for 
>> each language you support. Who will they be and what will the 
>> recruitment process be? Will they get any training?
> 
> Well, in my opinion, the wiki is supposed to be self-maintained (as in 
> "users themselves are expected to fix spam/vandalism/whatever"). Isn't 
> that a concept that works on large wikis pretty well? Do you have 
> reasons to believe that it won't work for a Gentoo one?

Wiki's are not self maintaining. I don't believe you've ever been 
involved with one to any extent if you believe this. Any unmaintained 
wiki will become a useless mass of spam and bad articles.

While most of the maintainence work is doable by registered users, there 
are some tasks which registered users can't (and you wouldn't want them 
to be able to) do, such as deleting articles and banning users. If you 
don't ban spammers and their IPs, they will just keep coming back and 
you'll have a snowball effect on your hands. While users can remove all 
content from any article, they can't actually delete articles (or 
undelete them). You'll want to do this to keep the wiki clean, otherwise 
you'll end up with lots of empty pages.

While users can do other chores such as moving pages to comply with 
naming conventions and checking and tagging articles that need cleaning 
up (and then actually cleaning them up), my opinion is that you will 
want a team of dedicated volunteers to do this. Give them a title like 
"Wiki maintainer" or something similar. While ideally users would do 
these tasks without such structure, I believe giving them titles (even 
if they don't get any powers over regular users) does help.


> 
>> If you intend to create a wiki to replace gentoo-wiki.com, how will 
>> you handle this? If the wikis end up running side-by-side, will you 
>> have policies on copying from gentoo-wiki.com? (You should probably 
>> have policies on copying from other wikis anyway)
> 
> This reminds me of an "issue" with the license of your wiki. While you 
> are of course free to choose any license you want for your projects, 
> have you considered switching to CC-BY-SA instead of CC-BY-NC-SA? That 
> is a license that is: a) used by all of the Gentoo documentation, b) 
> compatible with the recent release of GFDL. The current license, while 
> being a bit more protective about user's rights, prevents any contents 
> from our documentation or, for example, the Wikipedia, to be used in 
> your wiki and vice versa.
> 
> And there's also one last point that I believe should be raised here. 
> The gentoo-wiki.com, as it is now, currently violates some of the bits 
> of our name-logo-usage document [2]. I believe this is not done on 
> purpose, but rather as an error. Could you please have a look at the 
> document and fix the wiki templates, so that it is compliant with our 
> document?

We'll check the issues you've raised above and make any changes we 
believe necessary. Thanks for raising this.

> 
> Please don't take me wrong here, I've personally found many of the 
> resources available at your wiki really valuable (with some of the 
> others being, well, broken). I was sad to see gentoo-wiki going down 
> (and can realize your frustration when you can't reach your boxes 
> anymore), but even more disappointed when users came to us, the Gentoo 
> developers, and expressed that they weren't aware that none of the 
> gentoo-*.com projects are *not* affiliated with Gentoo at all.

To my knowledge the wiki has always made best efforts to inform users 
that the site is official and has never claimed to be official in any 
capacity. It is and never has been the intention to mislead anyone in 
this regard.

AllenJB

> 
> Cheers,
> -jkt
> 
> [1] 
> http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-doc/msg_9ffb2b35be3b5c6724f290dccd0897bf.xml 
> 
> [2] http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/name-logo.xml
> 
> 

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Nicolas Sebrecht]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 03:22:18PM -0800, Josh Saddler wrote:

> We're going to see what we already have now: a conflict between the wiki
> and the "official" documentation.

I'm pretty sure users would see the wiki as an extra source of
documentation, not a "conflicting with" official documentation. Wikis
are (in essence and in users mind at least) known to be a *users*
product. This implies it could be sometimes not perfect or partially
wrong/obsolete.

> "Well, the wiki says this, but the official docs say this."
> "Which do I follow?"
> "Well, the official docs are wrong/out-of-date, just do the wiki, even
> though it's harder to follow." Etc.
> 
> This is why I feel having a wiki really *is* relevant to the GDP. 

Of course, such confilts could happen. IMHO it's not a valuable reason
to have a wiki checked by the GDP anymore (taking out licensing or alike
considarations).

Conflicts should obiously be a start up to improvements.

> Also, if we do have a wiki, why shouldn't the *GDP* embrace it in some
> way? 

Why the GDP couldn't embrace a really opened wiki ? The GDP members have
fortunately all the requirements to become contributors/admins.

>                       There may be some merit in attempting to merge
> these disparate documentation bases. Maybe it could be a way to increase
> participation from the community.

I think that an irrelevant to the GDP wiki *is* a way to increase
participation from the community.

-- 
Nicolas Sebrecht

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Marco Clocchiatti]

>
> I'm pretty sure users would see the wiki as an extra source of
> documentation, not a "conflicting with" official documentation. Wikis
> are (in essence and in users mind at least) known to be a *users*
> product. This implies it could be sometimes not perfect or partially
> wrong/obsolete.
>
I agree,
the goal of wiki is not the technical quality (even if the quality
also is often very good), but the free expression of users.
it's a service for the community, not a launch window of the distribution.

the only thing developers should do in the wiki is to have sometimes a
look to some principal articles, but they have not to carry the
responsiblity of them. History carries this resposibility for them.

my few cent (and sorry for my english).

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Jose Luis Rivero]

Josh Saddler wrote:
> Hey again. So there's some discussion (again) on starting up an official
> Gentoo wiki. Official meaning it's hosted on our infrastructure; e.g.
> wiki.gentoo.org. This time the discussion is coming from our fellow
> developers and infra overlords.
> 

Our fellow developers or infra overlords have seen any problem in how do 
we work and the status of the current documentation? This list is open 
to anyone and I haven't read any mail saying so.

> 
> However, it's been quite awhile since the last time we (the GDP) talked
> it over. Given our current issues of manpower and time (see
> archives.gentoo.org for commit totals), perhaps a wiki could solve some
> issues?

Let's face what problems we have in GDP and find a way to solve them. 
The solution should not bring new problems or make our most powerful 
features worst.

> The classic problems are:
> 1) Who has access
> 2) Who reports faulty articles
> 3) Who fixes them
> 4) Who verifies the article is correct
> 5) ???
> 6) Profit

These problems appear when you are going against wiki principles, may be 
are you trying to use a wiki for something which was not designed to?

> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
> not? 

What will be the propose of the wiki? More documentation? Written by 
anyone and hosted in gentoo.org? Without being sure about its quality 
first? If so, you have my "no, please".

> There's no question that having a properly-administered wiki can be a
> powerful asset. Look at Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, the Xfce wiki, etc. What
> about Gentoo?

Maybe I'm too ignorant but every time a look to Ubuntu or Debian wiki I 
wasn't able to be sure about the 'official','review','updated' state of 
the documentation.

Summarizing:

  - If you think we have problems in GDP, let's talk about them.
  - Seems to me that people is thinking of using a wiki not as a result
    of a process to solve a problem.
  - I prefer quality over quantity. Every step done shouldn't touch the
    Gentoo Documentation quality.
  - If someone is thinking of us involved in the wiki review or admin
    process and all its fun, please ask first.
  - If someone is thinking of replacing docs with a wiki, I really
    dislike the idea.

Thanks.

--
Jose Luis Rivero <yoswink@gentoo.org>
Gentoo/Alpha Gentoo/Doc

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[wireless]

Jose Luis Rivero wrote:

>> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
>> not? 

NO !!!

> What will be the propose of the wiki? More documentation? Written by
> anyone and hosted in gentoo.org? Without being sure about its quality
> first? If so, you have my "no, please".

>> There's no question that having a properly-administered wiki can be a
>> powerful asset. Look at Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, the Xfce wiki, etc. What
>> about Gentoo?

> Maybe I'm too ignorant but every time a look to Ubuntu or Debian wiki I
> wasn't able to be sure about the 'official','review','updated' state of
> the documentation.

> Summarizing: 
>  - If you think we have problems in GDP, let's talk about them.
>  - Seems to me that people is thinking of using a wiki not as a result
>    of a process to solve a problem.
>  - I prefer quality over quantity. Every step done shouldn't touch the
>    Gentoo Documentation quality.
>  - If someone is thinking of us involved in the wiki review or admin
>    process and all its fun, please ask first.
>  - If someone is thinking of replacing docs with a wiki, I really
>    dislike the idea.

Sorry for the delayed response, I've been unplugged for a while.....


After reading the entire thread, a rather simple solution seems
obvious. The GDP or Infra or whatever official group should stay
out of the the wiki business, for many aforementioned reasons.


However, if  what ever the new wiki(s) pop up for the ashes of any
previous efforts, it seem like a natural place for 'official gentoo
folks' to peruse, parse, filter and/or glean information for good
ideas and (tested) content into one of the existing gentoo
semantics (GDP infra whatever), but leave the morass of a wiki to
the user community at large.

That way folks could first look to the trunk of Gentoo for docs
on a given subject and if nothing there exist, THEN go to any
of these community wikis.


For example, installing a webcam is pretty important and very, very
common among needs for any distro. Yet if you google for webcam,
install and gentoo, you get a variety of 'hash' mostly outdated.


Those talent folks within the official gentoo structure, should
recognize this and build docs somewhere, of high quality, that
walk a gentoo user through how to set up a capture card (ntsc/pal)
or a web cam.

But for every issue that really needs a good doc, there will be
many wikis with a variety of quality, mostly due to the lack of
maintenance over time.   Smart folks with lots of current
responsibilities, should stay focused on current goals.


However, as the external gentoo wikis mature, but the others
in the gentoo community, folks can glean good idea to increase
the officially maintained docs.

YMMV,

James

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[AllenJB]

Request for clarification:
So you're proposing that if I write a good article on the wiki, the 
Gentoo devs should take that article, XMLify it and put it on the static 
site where I can't update it easily?

AllenJB

wireless wrote:
> Jose Luis Rivero wrote:
> 
>>> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
>>> not? 
> 
> NO !!!
> 
>> What will be the propose of the wiki? More documentation? Written by
>> anyone and hosted in gentoo.org? Without being sure about its quality
>> first? If so, you have my "no, please".
> 
>>> There's no question that having a properly-administered wiki can be a
>>> powerful asset. Look at Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, the Xfce wiki, etc. What
>>> about Gentoo?
> 
>> Maybe I'm too ignorant but every time a look to Ubuntu or Debian wiki I
>> wasn't able to be sure about the 'official','review','updated' state of
>> the documentation.
> 
>> Summarizing: 
>>  - If you think we have problems in GDP, let's talk about them.
>>  - Seems to me that people is thinking of using a wiki not as a result
>>    of a process to solve a problem.
>>  - I prefer quality over quantity. Every step done shouldn't touch the
>>    Gentoo Documentation quality.
>>  - If someone is thinking of us involved in the wiki review or admin
>>    process and all its fun, please ask first.
>>  - If someone is thinking of replacing docs with a wiki, I really
>>    dislike the idea.
> 
> Sorry for the delayed response, I've been unplugged for a while.....
> 
> 
> After reading the entire thread, a rather simple solution seems
> obvious. The GDP or Infra or whatever official group should stay
> out of the the wiki business, for many aforementioned reasons.
> 
> 
> However, if  what ever the new wiki(s) pop up for the ashes of any
> previous efforts, it seem like a natural place for 'official gentoo
> folks' to peruse, parse, filter and/or glean information for good
> ideas and (tested) content into one of the existing gentoo
> semantics (GDP infra whatever), but leave the morass of a wiki to
> the user community at large.
> 
> That way folks could first look to the trunk of Gentoo for docs
> on a given subject and if nothing there exist, THEN go to any
> of these community wikis.
> 
> 
> For example, installing a webcam is pretty important and very, very
> common among needs for any distro. Yet if you google for webcam,
> install and gentoo, you get a variety of 'hash' mostly outdated.
> 
> 
> Those talent folks within the official gentoo structure, should
> recognize this and build docs somewhere, of high quality, that
> walk a gentoo user through how to set up a capture card (ntsc/pal)
> or a web cam.
> 
> But for every issue that really needs a good doc, there will be
> many wikis with a variety of quality, mostly due to the lack of
> maintenance over time.   Smart folks with lots of current
> responsibilities, should stay focused on current goals.
> 
> 
> However, as the external gentoo wikis mature, but the others
> in the gentoo community, folks can glean good idea to increase
> the officially maintained docs.
> 
> YMMV,
> 
> James
> 

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Josh Saddler]

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AllenJB wrote:
> Request for clarification:
> So you're proposing that if I write a good article on the wiki, the
> Gentoo devs should take that article, XMLify it and put it on the static
> site where I can't update it easily?

Actually, I'm not sure that guy had anything to say, really. But yeah,
you're right; basically, it's a bad idea. If you write the article, best
to keep it someplace where you know it'll easily receive TLC.


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Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[wireless]

Josh Saddler wrote:
> AllenJB wrote:
>> Request for clarification:
>> So you're proposing that if I write a good article on the wiki, the
>> Gentoo devs should take that article, XMLify it and put it on the static
>> site where I can't update it easily?

Your docs on your wiki, should follow whatever semantic you like. 
Nobody is talking about hi-jacking your (wiki) docs. I'm talking about
maybe one out of fifty docs that  one typically finds on a wiki, could
be motivation (and yes some ideas) on creating a similar doc that
is officially bless and maintained, to a much higher standard and
address things such that they can influence some of the existing
official docs.

> Actually, I'm not sure that guy had anything to say, really. But yeah,
> you're right; basically, it's a bad idea. If you write the article, best
> to keep it someplace where you know it'll easily receive TLC.


Um, I think your both confused what I'm trying to say. I'll restate 
it, hopefully a little bit more clearly.

Running a wiki, which usually has many folks actively involved, where 
the emphasis is on quantity of docs, not rigid uniformity, and where 
the particular selection of docs will usually be vastly larger than 
any official  distro docs, you have completely different semantics, so 
they cannot be merged, without great pain, compromise and huge amounts
of time.


Let the wiki, (or any number of wikis) exist unto themselves. However, 
if a really good topic comes up, then those officially under much 
tighter constraints, such as GDP or infra, should consider maintaining
a similar doc, that is held to much tighter (semantics) controls.


Let's face it. We all re-hash much of the same content on different 
linux distros, or even the same linux distro, so *I* do not see any 
big deal with this concept. Google for something and often you find 
multiple wikis that address a given subject with different docs, but 
with much that is common. Occasionally one will see a reference to 
that original doc that inspired the derivative. Often the wiki docs 
are old and not maintained, for a variety of reason. Just google for 
how to install a camera on a linux machine for a myriad of ideas. It 
sure would be nice to have an officially maintain basic video setup on 
gentoo, either using capture cards or a cheap webcam, as a baseline
for folks to get something working. (using my previous example). It 
would not have to be encompassing but it should be maintained to GDP
or such standards. Then let the wiki document, via dozens of different
documents, many of the finer, fast moving aspects of cameras and 
video. I.E. *Complimentary documents* not competing documents....



Two docs that address the same subject, one on a wiki, the other part 
of the official gentoo docs is good for users. The official docs will 
never be as numerous as other docs folks use to solve a problem or at
least get some ideas how to install or fix something. However what is
part of the official docs should be rigorously maintained, and held to 
a much higher standard, than the typical wiki, imho.


There is a reason we have many motorcycles and many vehicles with 4 
wheels. However, how often do you see a three-wheeled vehicle? Sure 
they exist, but, they are not common and they are very easily wrecked. 
Remember the early ones for recreational vehicles in the 1980s? They 
have been baned here in the US, because they were prone to 
catastrophic failure. Ditto for merging a wiki and official distro docs.



ymmv,
James

Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[AllenJB]

wireless wrote:
> Josh Saddler wrote:
>> AllenJB wrote:
>>> Request for clarification:
>>> So you're proposing that if I write a good article on the wiki, the
>>> Gentoo devs should take that article, XMLify it and put it on the static
>>> site where I can't update it easily?
> 
> Your docs on your wiki, should follow whatever semantic you like. Nobody 
> is talking about hi-jacking your (wiki) docs. I'm talking about
> maybe one out of fifty docs that  one typically finds on a wiki, could
> be motivation (and yes some ideas) on creating a similar doc that
> is officially bless and maintained, to a much higher standard and
> address things such that they can influence some of the existing
> official docs.

If there's already a high quality document on the wiki, why is there a 
need to duplicate efforts? Surely it's the areas NOT already covered by 
high quality documentation that should be concentrated on.

> 
>> Actually, I'm not sure that guy had anything to say, really. But yeah,
>> you're right; basically, it's a bad idea. If you write the article, best
>> to keep it someplace where you know it'll easily receive TLC.
> 
> 
> Um, I think your both confused what I'm trying to say. I'll restate it, 
> hopefully a little bit more clearly.
> 
> Running a wiki, which usually has many folks actively involved, where 
> the emphasis is on quantity of docs, not rigid uniformity, and where the 
> particular selection of docs will usually be vastly larger than any 
> official  distro docs, you have completely different semantics, so they 
> cannot be merged, without great pain, compromise and huge amounts
> of time.
> 
> 
> Let the wiki, (or any number of wikis) exist unto themselves. However, 
> if a really good topic comes up, then those officially under much 
> tighter constraints, such as GDP or infra, should consider maintaining
> a similar doc, that is held to much tighter (semantics) controls.

Again, you're suggesting duplication of efforts. What point would this 
have? What problem would it fix?

> Let's face it. We all re-hash much of the same content on different 
> linux distros, or even the same linux distro, so *I* do not see any big 
> deal with this concept. Google for something and often you find multiple 
> wikis that address a given subject with different docs, but with much 
> that is common. Occasionally one will see a reference to that original 
> doc that inspired the derivative. Often the wiki docs are old and not 
> maintained, for a variety of reason.

While this was true of the old wiki, it is certainly not true of the 
documents on the new Gentoo Wiki - they are being checked for accuracy 
and errors by a team of volunteers as they are being entered. We will be 
doing our best to keep it this way.

We're also already considering methods of indicating documents which we 
believe to be particularly good or particularly bad.

> Just google for how to install a
> camera on a linux machine for a myriad of ideas. It sure would be nice 
> to have an officially maintain basic video setup on gentoo, either using 
> capture cards or a cheap webcam, as a baseline
> for folks to get something working. (using my previous example). It 
> would not have to be encompassing but it should be maintained to GDP
> or such standards. Then let the wiki document, via dozens of different
> documents, many of the finer, fast moving aspects of cameras and video. 
> I.E. *Complimentary documents* not competing documents....

Why can't, where they exist, the wiki document both? You're not going to 
be able to stop people documenting certain things on the wiki (and as an 
admin of the wiki, I don't believe you'd want to).

> 
> Two docs that address the same subject, one on a wiki, the other part of 
> the official gentoo docs is good for users.
How is it good for users? Now they have to judge which document to follow.

>  The official docs will never
> be as numerous as other docs folks use to solve a problem or at
> least get some ideas how to install or fix something. However what is
> part of the official docs should be rigorously maintained, and held to a 
> much higher standard, than the typical wiki, imho.

> There is a reason we have many motorcycles and many vehicles with 4 
> wheels. However, how often do you see a three-wheeled vehicle? Sure they 
> exist, but, they are not common and they are very easily wrecked. 
> Remember the early ones for recreational vehicles in the 1980s? They 
> have been baned here in the US, because they were prone to catastrophic 
> failure. Ditto for merging a wiki and official distro docs.

I don't see what this analogy has to do with this discussion at all. It 
seems to be totally unrelated to me.

> 
> ymmv,
> James
> 

In my opinion, the Gentoo Documentation Project is there to maintain 
documentation on issues specifically related to Gentoo and issues which 
you'd expect to find official documents on. Things like upgrading to 
baselayout 2 or upgrading to a newer profile.

Meanwhile the wiki is there to basically document everything else. How 
to install and configure software or hardware (perhaps in a specific way).

There will always be some crossover, but that's the main "areas of 
responsibility" that I see each covering.

AllenJB