Wiki, Take #whatever
 

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. :)

Wiki, Take #whatever
 

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
__________________________________________________

Wiki, Take #whatever
 

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

Wiki, Take #whatever
 

> 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

Wiki, Take #whatever
 

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?

Wiki, Take #whatever
 

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.

Wiki, Take #whatever
 

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.

Wiki, Take #whatever
 

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.

Wiki, Take #whatever
 

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.

Wiki, Take #whatever
 

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.