[Nix-dev] Wiki is dead

[Peter Simons]

Hi Zimbatm,

 > Is the consensus really to kill the wiki or is it just because it's
 > in a bad state?

I suppose Rok is our local kill-the-wiki champion who can give you the
authoritative answer to this question, but FWIW my impression was that
our Wiki is in a rather poor state. Yes, there is useful information in
it, but unfortunately there is a lot of bad and/or outdated information,
too, and that mixture seems to do more harm than good.

Now, I don't believe that this kind of chaotic state is a necessary
trait of wikis per-se. The Arch Linux Wiki, for example, is generally
considered awesome and it contains a wealth of detailed technical
information that -- unlike our wiki -- looks extremely polished and well
maintained. So the underlying problem is clearly not the wiki format.
The difference between NixOS and Arch Linux seems to be that some Arch
enthusiast actually enjoy working on the wiki and spent time maintaining
it, whereas NixOS developers apparently don't do that. Whatever the
reasons are, the wiki gene appears to be underrepresented in our crowd.

Several people have made various initiatives to help improving the wiki,
but curiously enough none of those initiatives actually improved the
*contents*. Nix contributors clearly enjoy making the wiki prettier,
writing fancy CSS configurations, rendering the stuff in sophisticated
web development environments from various markup languages, etc., but
still despite all that effort put into the presentation and management
of the content, the content itself invariably remains the same.

Therefore, it is my perception that those initiatives will ultimately
not result in a better wiki because changing the wiki infrastructure
will not address the problem that we lack people who enjoy working on
the contents.

Best regards,
Peter