[Nix-dev] Wiki is dead

[Michael Alan Dorman]

> 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.

I wonder if people focus on the aesthetics simply because the platform
makes trying to effect change in those areas relatively achievable?

I can only speak for myself, obviously, but I find MediaWiki to be
cumbersome to work with---I find the formatting to be far less intuitive
than most of the alternatives (off the top of your head, is bold two
apostrophes or three?)---and having to create and edit (much less
reorganize and refactor) content via a web interface seems like so much
overhead that, ultimately, even small edits feel like too much effort.

This exact situation crops in my $DAYJOB as well, where we use MediaWiki
to try and organize internal documentation---and most of it gets put up
(which is, compared to everything else, relatively low cost), but then
the cost of modifying in all but trivial ways is high enough that people
would rather start over than do significant edits...and then the high
cost of reorganizing and refactoring means that we end up with duplicate
content, etc.

It makes me sad just to think about.  Honestly, I cannot comprehend how
Wikipedia even works, given the relatively horribleness of the tools
MediaWiki provides.

Would I contribute more (AKA: at all) to what amounts to a github pages
sort of thing?  Certainly there's no guarantees, but it would make it
far more probable, because the cost would be more in line with, say,
cleaning up a nix expression or some such: oh, I see an issue, let me
update my clone, make my edit, fire off a PR.  That's a workflow that I
manage quite happily and easily.

Mike.