[Nix-dev] Wiki is dead

[zimbatm]

@Peter: haha, point taken :)

So I went on #archlinux and asked a few questions on their wiki (transcript
below). It might seem obvious but basically it works because somebody close
to the core is owning the wiki.

------
[21:29] <zimbatm> over at #nixos we are wondering how arch manages to have
such an awesome wiki. how do you manage it, is somebody owning the wiki ?
[21:30] <alad> zimbatm: pierre manages the technical side of the wiki, and
you have like 3 people watching over the daily happenings
[21:30] <alad> zimbatm: otherwise it's just community maintained
[21:30] <Namarrgon> don't forget the goat blood and the virgins
[21:30] <alad> ^ yeah, important factor
[21:30] <zimbatm> do you have meetings about the content of the wiki ?
[21:31] <pid1> lol
[21:31] <pid1> The meetings are the Talk pages
[21:31] <alad> zimbatm: vast majority is in public discussions in articles,
or on "maintenance" pages like ArchWiki:Requests
[21:31] <alad> yeah, what pid1 said
[21:32] <alad> of course, you also have wiki-related discussions here, in
arch-general, on the forums, ...
[21:32] <pid1> Most changes are discussed there, and sometimes changes are
staged on an individual's page
[21:32] <zimbatm> I must say I'm impressed, arch wiki is always my go to
for linux issues
[21:33] <zimbatm> do you know if pierre one of the arch founder or core
contributors ?
[21:33] <zimbatm> i think we're having issues with ownership, most people
don't trust changing the wiki willy-nilly
[21:33] <alad> zimbatm: well, arch gets the upstream issues before most
others, issues on old versions are typically deleted after some time
[21:34] <alad> zimbatm: pierre is an arch developer, there are also some
wiki admins who are trusted users or involved in the forums, but most of
them focus on the actual wiki
[21:35] <pid1> zimbatm: It does help that the Arch wiki has a decent number
of people who watch the "Recent Changes" feed and watch for obvious
foolishness
[21:35] <zimbatm> okay. thanks a lot for clearing my questions. I agree,
somebody needs to take care and make sure the content is good and well
structured
[21:36] <zimbatm> yeah, nixos is like 100time smaller too
[21:38] <alad> zimbatm: I'd start by keeping the scope small, i.e., focused
on distribution-specific tools
[21:38] <alad> zimbatm: the developers should be able to help with that, too

On Mon, 15 Feb 2016 at 16:50 Marcus Brinkmann <
marcus.brinkmann at ruhr-uni-bochum.de> wrote:

> I feel like contributing a few points in a Wiki's defense, given the
> general negativity towards it, but I am not on a crusade :)
>
> In general, Wikipedia/MediaWiki works because it scales massively and
> provides excellent tools to detect and cope with vandalism.  The git
> workflow should scale very well, too, but under heavy parallel writes
> (at a Wikipedia level, not something I would expect for NixOS), the
> interactive nature of conflict resolution is going to be smoother than a
> git pull/push scenario (think about multiple users pounding on a page
> within seconds).
>
> The NixOS project is simply too small to have a well-maintained wiki at
> this point, which needs a certain critical mass.  But I think eventually
> things will tip in favor of the wiki, and NixOS' wiki will be as great
> as Arch and Gentoo (also an excellent wiki, and a much smaller community
> than Arch).  I also think that thematically NixOS will have much in
> common with these two wikis (the issues in maintaining these systems are
> similar).  So, I would look at Arch and Gentoo Wikis not as contrasting
> examples, but as a projection of the NixOS wiki in the future.  If you
> like the Wiki there, you would move away from that goal by not having a
> wiki.  I think that if you look at the early versions of those wikis,
> you will find them to be similar to what NixOS wiki looks today.
>
> A causal user, and even most developers, will not bother checking out a
> whole git repository to fix an issue in a single wiki page.  Wikis are
> optimized for low barrier of entry.
>
> Also, a MediaWiki installation will be easier to adapt, exetend and
> integrate with other tools in NixOS rather than for example the
> suggested github pages, which will always be limited by what github
> provides.
>
> I think that book-like manuals serve different purposes from a wiki.  I
> think both are needed.  Github pages may very well be suited to provide
> a good book-experience.
>
>
> On 02/15/2016 05:33 PM, Michael Alan Dorman wrote:
> >> 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.
> > _______________________________________________
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> > nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl
> > http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
> >
>
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