[Nix-dev] Wiki is dead

[Mateusz Czaplinski]

>From a newbie's perspective, I want to say two things:

1. From watching the "kill the wiki" presentation (as well as the later
discussions), I believe it was actually meant as a provocative/dramatical
(in a good way - as in "thought-provoking"/"wake-up call") way of saying
"we ought to improve the official docs/manual to be good enough, that wiki
should not be necessary", not as "let's just kill the wiki now and it will
magically improve the situation" that it seems to be understood as by some.

2. Without the wiki, *I wouldn't be able to start using Nix & NixOS*. I
really, really mean it! The tutorial and manual are very useful, but
they're missing some practical info, or sometimes it's hard to find (I
mentioned some specific points in an earlier thread). Being a newbie, I was
saved by the wiki from being stuck many times already.

With that said, personally I believe migrating the wiki to a repo would be
acceptable if needed as a way to kill spam. Also, I believe github has some
wiki features too, that can be enabled for a repo, so those could possibly
be considered too (or is that already what is proposed here by @zimbatm?).

Thanks & Best Regards,
/Mateusz.

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 1:41 PM, Peter Simons <simons at cryp.to> wrote:

> 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 it, but unfortunately there is a lot of bad and/or outdated information,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
>
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